Thursday’s webinar, Unleashing the Social Media and Search Power of Your Website, brought up an interesting point: conversations happen with or without us. I mean, sure they do. Conversations are going on all over the world that I’m not included in right this very minute. But I can get into a lot of them through social media.
Shy?
If I’m involved in conversations, the people I’m talking with get to know me and I get to know them. We can build a relationship. We can work out any misunderstandings that arise. It gives me a chance to make more friends, tighten up my connections. That’s terrific!
For a business, it is more than terrific. It might just be essential. If people are posting about your products or services, you have a huge opportunity to connect directly to your clients. You can respond to their questions, appreciate their compliments, and, if necessary, clear up their complaints. You can present your company in the best possible light as engaged, responsive, and caring.
So the time has come to get out of the corner and into the middle of the room. Talk to people. It’ll be fun.
Tags: Blogs, Highlights, Social Media, Webinar
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Warning!
When I was a kid, my parents from time to time left me in charge of my younger brother. Since we both still had all our limbs when they returned, they figured it worked just fine and they could keep on doing it. Neither my brother nor I particularly enjoyed it, but we coped. (Kicking and screaming are valid methods of coping, right?)
I bring this up because the biggest problem with me taking care of my brother, from my perspective, was unsupervised thinking. When he was quiet and calm, it was NOT a blessing; it was a warning that he was about to break out in a new direction. It was much better if I could preemptively direct his thoughts toward a safe goal, like a nice game of 52-pickup, before he came up with something like indoor dodgeball.
Unsupervised thinking is dangerous when it comes to website visitors as well, as I learned today in our webinar, Proven Copywriting for SEO and PPC. When people click on a PPC ad, they arrive at a landing page. That page should give them clear direction about what to do next: fill out a form, download a white paper, request a demo, etc. A little guidance will help a lot with your conversion rate.
If the page has too much information on it, the clickers get confused or frustrated. They may forget why they came to your site in the first place. They may click away to some other site instead of staying to buy your product or request more information. Help them out; give them a clear and simple path for their thoughts, a goal to click toward.
Tags: Blogs, Conversion Rates, Highlights, PPC, SEO
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What a lot of spiders! They must like it here!
Why should I bother to read your site? There are so many sites out there and I really don’t have time to look at yours.
Good question. Both human and crawler visitors want to know. Answering that question with your content is the big task of content writing. Fortunately, our latest webinar in the Introduction to SEO series, Copywriting for SEO: The Art and Science of Content Creation, provided insight to our audience today.
To begin, you need some attention. Great titles for your articles attract readers, but they won’t stay long if that’s all you have on offer. Spiders, much like people, get impatient and bored with the same old stuff. Give them a compelling subject underneath that great title, and they’ll stick around. It’s even better if you make it funny, educational, engaging, or all of the above.
However nice it is to have folks sticking around to read the content you’ve spent so much time and energy creating, it’s not enough. You want them to DO something while they’re with you. Ensuring that there is a call to action—a link to click to download a white paper, perhaps—up high on the page helps to turn casual visitors into actual leads.
Finally, write like a human, but keep an eye on the spiders. Spiders understand a lot more about context than they used to. They will be able to get the gist of what your content is about, much like your human readers. Using your keywords in your content makes spiders notice them and subsequently improve your rankings for them.
The answer to why I should bother with your site? Because it’s fascinating, timely, relevant, useful, and often really entertaining. And I don’t mind all the spiders it attracts; I don’t have arachnophobia.
Tags: Blogs, Google spiders, Highlights, keywords, SEO, Webinar, Webmarketing123
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When you redesign your website, it’s a lot like moving. You won’t throw out your back lifting heavy boxes and you won’t have to figure out how to maneuver your suddenly much-longer-than-you-thought couch around the corner to get to the door, but there are a lot of similar logistical problems. In today’s webinar, Improving Your Search Rankings During a Website Redesign, Mike Turner gave a comprehensive overview of all of them, but one in particular stood out: Don’t reinvent the wheel, just redirect it.
A real-life move takes you from one habitable spot to another. Much as you wouldn’t move without your treasured inlaid mint-condition doodlesnipper because of its immense sentimental and actual value, you shouldn’t move your site without a plan to take your search engine rankings with you.
Before you ship that doodlesnipper, you want to take a picture of it, just in case. Similarly, you should take a snapshot of your keyword rankings before the move as baselines for your traffic after the move. Because the doodlesnipper is large with many attachments, you need to make sure all the boxes are clearly labeled and that you have mapped out where all the parts are going to go in the new living room. Those attachments are like the different pages of your site; when you change their URLs, you have to map out which old ones should redirect to which new ones.
Then the key: 301 Redirects. Much as you forward your mail from one physical address to another, you forward your old page visits to your new pages. You want to use the 301 Redirect rather than the 302 because you want the change to be permanent, lest the crawlers consider your new page just a squatter and not worth bothering about.
Redirecting the tens or hundreds or thousands of pages on your site is definitely a big job. The good news is that you don’t have to hire a truck.
Tags: Blogs, Highlights, keywords, SEO, Webinar
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Our Introduction to SEO webinar series continued today with The Six Pillars of SEO. Here’s the two-minute, Cliff’s Notes version:
- Keywords: These are the words you are optimizing around, the terms that you want to show up for when users search.
- Site Content: Writing keyword-rich content helps search engine crawlers recognize your pages as relevant.
- Meta Content: Customizing your page titles, meta content, and meta keywords, while old-school, are still best practice for optimization.
- URLs: Using your keywords in your URLs will improve your rankings on results pages.
- Inbound Links: When other sites link to your site as an authority, search engines are more likely to see you as one, too, moving you up the rankings.
- Content Silos: Organizing your content into cohesive units helps search engine crawlers perceive your themes and find you more relevant.
And if you want to schedule a free site analysis for more details, click here.
Tags: Blogs, Google, Highlights, keywords, Webinar, Webmarketing123
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map of Oakland, CA
Which would you rather use, a map or a GPS? It might depend on how badly lost you are and what kind of location you find yourself in. Then again, having both might be best. Then you’d be prepared for both streets and rough terrain, able to cross-reference.
“Both” is the right answer when it comes to site maps as well, as mentioned in today’s webinar, Organizing Your Website Content for Optimal SEO. An on-page site map is like a road map, something on which you can trace your route with your finger. A glance at the map will let you know how many blocks it is to the library, or the post office in real life, or how many clicks to the contacts page, the products page, or the specifications page in the virtual world. The on-page site map is there to help users navigate easily.
By contrast, the off-page site map is more like the GPS version. The xml format considers different data, geared more toward search engine spiders. Spiders want, figuratively, latitude and longitude: priority codes, frequency codes, and last modification dates. It’s harder to see which streets intersect this way, but the most important landmarks stand out and changes are highlighted.
Like any maps, both kinds of site maps are only as useful as they are up-to-date. Finding your way through any major city with a map from the 1960’s might well turn into an unexpected adventure; similarly, an outdated GPS could strand you at new dead ends, or attempt to lead you along roads that don’t exist. Every time you change your site, you need to update your maps or risk losing your visitors.
GPS device
Tags: Blogs, Highlights, SEO, Webinar, Webmarketing123
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“Tell me about your SEO marketing…”
The topic is probably not angst-producing enough to require a couch to lie on, but does require some analysis, as mentioned in our webinar, Top Ten Tips for SEO in 2010, part of our Introduction to SEO webinar series.
No matter how many of the SEO principles you put in place, you will have no objective sense of their effects without analysis. Were more people finding you because of your new keywords? Were more visitors converting into customers? Sure, you can get a ballpark sense of whether things are getting better or worse, but you want to get a handle on the details. Approximation might get you somewhere, but if you really want to get to the moon, you had better aim carefully and track your trajectory obsessively.
Analysis does take time and commitment. It’s totally worthwhile to invest those resources to excel.
Tags: Blogs, Highlights, SEO, Webinar, Webmarketing123
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That first recess at a new school can be awkward. Do the kids play the same games here? What are the unwritten rules for the swings? Do the big kids meet on the blacktop or under the trees by the fence? And, most importantly, will anyone want to play with me?
Social media marketing, for many companies, feels about as comfortable as that new playground. Some companies suddenly feel the urge to hide in the library until recess is over and the understandable, bell-regulated classroom time begins again. But hiding won’t make it go away.
The good news, as Barbara mentioned in the webinar, Social Media Marketing and ROI, is that you don’t have to jump into the middle of the playground right away. It’s a good idea, in fact, to linger at the edge of the tanbark and watch what the other kids are doing, listen to what they’re saying, and begin to play once you know where the hot lava monster lives. From a social media perspective, this means checking out what other companies are doing, soaking up the culture, and only then joining the conversations and starting your own.
It can be a challenge to companies who are used to dealing in websites, which are, as Barbara says, like resumes, clean and professional, to switch to the casual style of social media. You don’t want to play tag in your suit, so to speak, and if you try, you may not get the results you want (although the embarrassment it would cause might make an engaging blog post…). Social media requires a new level of integration between the professional and the casual, the business person and the everyday person.
School would be unbearable for even the most dedicated student without some time to play four-square. Similarly, company marketing strategies need to add social media to their mix along with their other approaches to ensure a happy, healthy outcome.
Tags: Highlights, SMM, Social Media, Webinar, Webmarketing123
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Somewhere on the Internet, there is a run-down neighborhood cluttered with discards. Drifts of items pile up in abandoned shopping carts. CDs and sweaters and figurines and television sets spill out onto the information highway.
The neighborhood is not far from the slick shopping districts with the shiny sites. It’s a mere five clicks away, according to today’s webinar, Optimize Your eCommerce SEO and Conversion Rates.
Five clicks.
Five clicks are the difference between a forlorn abandoned shopping cart and retail heaven. If it takes more than five clicks for visitors to your site to purchase your products, they are likely to leave the stuff in the cart and walk out of your store. It’s understandable, really. In the same way that you reconsider that driving NEED for a pint of ice cream when you confront the 47 people in line at the grocery checkout, your potential customers get annoyed and cranky long before they reach the register.
Fight internet litter! Clean up the neighborhood! Save the clicks.
Tags: Blogs, Conversion Rates, E-Commerce, eCommerce, Highlights, SEO, Webinar
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At today’s webinar on The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your SEO, Antonio mentioned that Google’s spiders recognize “natural term language.” Humans, writing content for pages using normal language, certainly use keyword terms—you have to use terms you want to rank for—but excessive use annoys the spiders (not to mention other humans!).
In simple terms, if you wanted to feed the spiders your great new gizmo, you might write:
Welcome to Gizmoland’s website! We developed our great new gizmo with features you can use right now. Our great new gizmo does more in less time for fewer dollars. It can change your life.
Okay, so you might not write that, but great new gizmo occurs in the text in ways that feel correct, natural.
By contrast, if you write:
Welcome to Gizmoland’s website, the home of our great new gizmo. We developed our great new gizmo with features you can use for all your great new gizmo needs right this very minute at great new gizmo time. Our great new gizmo works faster! The great new gizmo does more! The great new gizmo costs less! The great new gizmo can change your life. Have I mentioned that we have a great new gizmo? Just (great new gizmo) in (great new gizmo) case (great new gizmo), let (great new gizmo) me (great new gizmo) tell (great new gizmo) you (great new gizmo) about (great new gizmo) our (great new gizmo) great new gizmo…
The spiders will run screaming as fast as their virtual eight legs will carry them, screaming, “Cheater, cheater, bug eater!” Worse, if that text made it through the spider barrier, your potential clients might actually read it, and then you’d be in real trouble.
Tags: Google spiders, Highlights, Outsourcing, SEO, Webinar
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