Archive for the 'Website Search Engine Optimization' Category

How Should You Measure Online Marketing?

Today, it is highly debated whether the old rules of measurement still apply to modern marketing. But there is no doubt about the importance of newly emerging metrics.

Challenge Old Metrics
For a long time, measurement of marketing efforts has been around sales leads. But things have rapidly changed with the development of new technologies and especially with the growth of the Web. Are you taking notice of these emerging realities and incorporating them into your marketing reporting mix?

Focus on Exposure
Marketers should develop new metrics that track exposure to ideas. Interestingly enough, this comes even prior to the actual sales cycle. A lot of the measurement happens higher up in the funnel. Where in search engines is your content appearing when people enter specific keywords? How can you get to the first listing? These are the types of questions that will help you focus on making your ideas and content more visible to the public.

What Should You Measure?
It’s easy to get lost in different metrics that don’t help you improve your strategy but turn into a burden. Avoid making this mistake and focus on a few key elements to track. You can measure the number of people reading your blog posts. You can track your performance in search engines. You can see how many people are following you on Twitter. All these things demonstrate your reach and how it is growing (or decreasing). The larger the exposure, the more triggers to the sales process you are creating.

Using Google+ to build your business

Google+ is the new player in the block. It has quickly become the place to be in social media.

The last thing entrepreneurs need is another social network to join, right? Weren’t you just getting the hang of Twitter? Didn’t you just start putting that Facebook business page together? So why is this important to get into Google+ now?

What I’ve seen so far is that the new social network from Google has a lot of advantages that are worth thinking about, and entrepreneurial types should take a look-see.

THE NEXT BIG THING
Google+ is a social networking platform, but you can look at it a lot of different ways. You can say it’s like Facebook, only cleaner. It’s like Twitter, only more engaging. It has the potential to be a great collaboration and communication platform (you can isolate who sees information by sharing it with specific Circles, or groupings of people).

Also, realize that Google+ is indexed by the biggest search engine in the world, also known as Google. Other search engines like it, too. And it has a lot of integration points, such as Google Places (which shows you location information), and an incredible potential for integrating even more of Google’s services over time.

HOW IT WILL HELP YOUR BUSINESS
Social networks are built to try and emulate real-world connectivity and information-sharing. On one hand, they’re like a more interesting telephone. On the other hand, they’re built to augment (not replace) cocktail parties, chamber of commerce meetings and other places where people get to know each other (or at least used to). Google+ does this surprisingly well, for a few reasons.
Google+ lets you share photos, videos, links and location data with everyone, or with your select Circles. Thus, when you find the good stuff that applies to your real estate friends, if you’ve grouped them into a Circle, you can send that information only to them. Other times, you can share with the general public to try and grow your audience.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT
First (and important) Facebook is not indexed by Google for search results, meaning that everything you do inside there stays inside there. Second, Facebook and LinkedIn both are set up for more of an “exclusive” model, which means that you have to know someone to know something. That’s why you see companies pushing so hard for “likes,” and why you see people spam the LinkedIn Groups.
Google+ is slowly rolling out their “for business” parts of the platform.

GET IN EARLY
Simply put, it’s important to take action on Google+ right now. I saw the benefits of this when I joined Twitter a while ago. If you get in, get familiar, start growing connections and learn how to curate and share, you’ll be ahead of the game.

How to Optimize Your Press Release

Why Submit Your Press Release to Distribution Services?

Think about Google News and Yahoo! News as different search engines. In order to get your content to be indexed in these places, you need to submit your press release to one of the recognized press release distribution services.

Where to Submit Your Press Release?
The five big ones are: PRWeb, PR Newswire, Business Wire, Marketwire and PrimeNewswire. There are other less popular ones, plus free services you may be able to use. While we encourage you to experiment, make sure you know what you are getting. You should have access to the main search engines and the capability to hyperlink from the press release to your site.

The # 1 Critical Element in Press Releases
Including hyperlinks in your press releases is critical. Make sure to hyperlink relevant words directing to targeted pages. For instance, if your press release is about a new product launch, you should hyperlink the most important phrases and send people to your website pages corresponding to these phrases. This is essential for search engine optimization.

Don’t Forget to Publish on Your Site
In addition to sending the press release to reputable distribution services, you should also publish it on your own website. Put it up on the Media page, on your blog or wherever you think is appropriate. If you put it on your site, it is going to get indexed by the main part of Google.

Why user-generated content matters to drive sales for your website

Integrating user-generated content (UGC) into the product page is a proven, effective way to drive more traffic to your product pages. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of integrating UGC on the product page:

  • User-generated content provides addition information about the page that it lives on, which boosts relevancy.
  • UGC produces valuable longtail keywords written in user syntax. Customers could be using adjectives and superlatives not included in the marketing copy or that the manufacturer wouldn’t use to describe a product. (For example, a “sofa” may be listed, but a customer could describe it as a “couch.”)
  • UGC increases relevant keyword density on the page. The keywords that are used in the marketing copy can drive up your SEO ranking based on density (how many times the word is used on a page).
  • UGC is constantly updated which is favors by Google. In order to remain relevant, content should not be stale and unchanged.

There are many types of UGC valued by Google, including but not limited to: customer reviews, Q&A, discussion forums, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and Wiki Entries.

Getting Started With Twitter for Business

Twitter is a social network on which users share short, 140-character messages with each other. Users “follow” or subscribe to each other and can receive messages from each other via multiple technology devices including desktop computers, smart phones, and text messages.

As mentioned previously, for business, it is best to use Twitter‟s free search engine, Twitter Search to search for your business, competitors, and industry mentions on Twitter.

Understanding how and if people are talking about your business and industry will give you enough information to determine if you should invest the time to start and manage a Twitter account for your business.

If you decide that Twitter is right for your business, you can visit Twitter.com to sign up for a free account.

Here are a few tips for setting up a business Twitter account:

  • Use the name of you business as your Twitter username.
  • Use your business logo or a picture of the person managing the account as the profile image for the account.
  • Create a custom Twitter background that provides additional information about your business.
  • Use Advanced Twitter Search to help determine industry influencers and potential customers that your business should follow.

Images on a web page

Images on a web page can certainly enhance user experience. However, when inserting images into your website, you should keep in mind the following:

  • Don‟t use images excessively. More pictures means your page will take longer to load. This has a negative impact both on user experience and search engine optimization.
  • Associate text with pictures. Search engines do not „read‟ images; they read only text. ALT text is an HTML attribute you can add to your picture so search engines replace the image with some associated text.
  • Include keywords in your image file name. This will help you draw in relevant traffic from image searches. Separate different keywords in the file name with a dash (-).

Key Components of a Great Blog Post

A well-constructed blog post should include several key components:

  • An Attention-Grabbing Article Title: Because your blog article’s title is the first thing people will see, it’s important to make sure it clearly indicates what the article is about, is concise, keyword-rich (because the header tag is the most important for SEO), and attention grabbing.
  • Well Written & Formatted Text: The body of your article should be well-written and formatted in a way that makes it easy to read. Consider using header tags and bullet-lists to break up the content into sections.
  • Images/Videos: Relevant multimedia content can make a blog article more memorable and fun to read. It also helps to break up text to make it more pleasing to the eye.
  • Links: Include in-text links to relevant content. These can also point to landing pages to help you generate more leads for your content.
  • Call-to-Action: Each and every blog article you publish should include a relevant call-to-action at the bottom of the article to help boost lead generation.

Principles of Good URL Structure

The URL of a web page is its web address. The URL structure of a website is about how the different URLs connect with each other.

Unfortunately, improving your URL structure is one of the more difficult aspects of on-page website optimization. The methods of fixing these issues depend entirely on the back-end parts of your website, such as your content management system or programming framework. Nevertheless, if you have a competent developer by your side, having him or her tackle these issues can significantly improve your SEO. Your best approach might be to hand your developer the following list.

Here are the Principles of Good URL Structure:

  • Apply a 301 redirect where required. A 301 redirect forwards an old URL to a new one after it changes. Make sure you do this if you change the URL of a page on your site. A common mistake is not applying a 301 redirect between yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com. This can be quite a problem from an SEO standpoint, because search engines will give separate credit to both versions of your site.
  • Avoid pages with deeply nested URLs. Here is an example of what a deeply nested URL would look like: http://yoursite.com/about/management/contact/phone. Deeply nested pages will get less SEO credit. You can fix this problem by improving your overall site design.
  • Include keywords in your URLs. If you’ve already purchased your main URL, then don’t worry about buying a new one just for this sake. But you can clean the URLs of your interior pages to include keywords and not look like gibberish.
  • For your internal page URLs, separate individual keywords with dashes (- or _). For example: http://www.skysoftconsulting.com/website_design/ is a good URL that captures ‘website design’ and ‘website consulting’ as keywords.

Create static URLs, not dynamic ones. This means that the URL for one of your pages should be the same, no matter what. Check if you see different URLs for the same page in your website. If there are, you can look into how to create static URLs with your web server software. Do a Google search on “create static URL” + (name of your server software)

Effectiveness of using dedicated landing pages

Overall, dedicated landing pages are clearly effective. Depending on the scale of the campaign, their effectiveness can appear lesser or greater. At the same time, as with many other tactics presented in this report, the reader should keep in mind that benchmark survey respondents are likely on average more experienced and successful Landing Page Optimization practitioners, and therefore their results are above average.

The key takeaway from this simple chart is that close to half of the marketers that used Dedicated Landing Pages found them to be very effective – definitively showing that the opportunity does exist.

How to Create a Keyword Strategy

More and more consumers are finding businesses online through search engines. How do they find them? By using keywords!

Fortunately, you can take advantage of this consumer habit by optimizing your website around the keywords that are relevant to your business and which keywords consumers are using to find you online. This will increase your chances of getting found by people searching with those keywords, which will drive more and better quality traffic to your business’ website.

1. Create a list of 3-5 keywords relevant to your business.
Think like you‟re using the brain of someone searching for your product with a search engine. For small- and medium-sized businesses, your keywords are not your brand name. Instead, think of words and short phrases that get to the core of what your product or service is about.

2. Choose keywords based on difficulty and relevance.
The keywords you choose should be based on difficulty and relevance.

Some very general words such as “marketing” or “business” are very competitive, making it harder to rank well for them in search engine results. If you are a small- or medium-sized business, you probably want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business (these are commonly referred to as long tail keywords). The greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is. There are a number of different tools you can use to determine the competitiveness of a specific keyword as well as suggest and help you brainstorm new keyword ideas. These tools include the Google Keyword Tool.

Another important factor for picking keywords is their relevance to your business. While some obscure terms might be easy to rank for, they might not be relevant to your business.
You should find a balance between relevance and difficulty. Choose about 5 keywords that match your business well.

3. Design and optimize your website around your keywords.
Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, you should incorporate them into your website.