September 2nd, 2010
Blogging is definitely becoming a company-wide effort, so make sure you take note of how to participate effectively in this activity–whether it be for personal or professional reasons!
Update Blogs Frequently
It might seem obvious to update a blog regularly, but many blogs suffer from a lack of fresh content. There are many reasons to produce new content regularly for your blog, and, given the nature of blogs, they are much easier to update than a website. One of the biggest reasons to update is to keep your readers coming back. If a blog is never updated with new posts, readers will start to lose their incentive to check back for new content. Additionally, if the blog is hosted on your website, search engines will look favorably on all of the new content being added to your site on a consistent basis.
Provide Useful, Informative Content
It might be tempting to write a blog post hyping your newest product or promoting your company, but blog readers are looking for informative, sincere content. Most readers can tell the difference between a blog with useful information versus a blog that sounds like a marketing campaign or advertisement. Take this opportunity to connect with customers and provide them with honest information about new products, industry trends, or even job openings. However, stay away from blog posts that seem like they have a hidden motive; provide a real and honest voice on your blog that customers can relate to. A great way to get sincere and also fresh content is to encourage employees to write blog posts. This is often the best way to come up with new content and give more employees a personal voice in the company.
Utilize Keywords in Blog Posts
Many of our clients understand the value of keywords, as they are the basis of search engine optimization, but the importance of using keywords cannot be overstated. Keywords are search terms that customers use to find your site, your blog, or your product. Not using keywords within your blog content underutilizes a valuable resource. It is possible to use keywords as many times as it makes sense to in a given article, but make sure to not throw keywords in excessively. This is called keyword-stuffing; search engines consider this “spammy” and downgrade your rankings accordingly. A good baseline is to use all primary keywords two to three times each in a 250-300 word article, and any secondary keywords once in an article.
Choose Effective Titles and Calls to Action
In addition to keywords, there are many other opportunities in a blog post to be very specific in word choice. A catchy, attention-getting title might be the determining factor in whether someone clicks a link to your blog post. A great technique is to ask or answer a question in the title of your blog, prompting your readers to want to find out more about your subject. Examples might include “10 Tips to Increase Search Engine Rankings” or “Why isn’t my website ranking where it should be?” Now that you’ve gotten people to your blog post with a catchy title, where would you like for them to go next? Would you like them to click over to your website and do some research on your products? How about signing up for a newsletter or becoming a member of your blog? Whatever the goal of your blog, make that clear. A great place for a call to action is the footer of your blog. Here, you can provide a value proposition or call to action with a link to the next step.
I hope this information helps you and/or your company in writing upcoming posts, as well as providing structure to your blog as a whole!
-Alex
Tags: blog posts, Blogs, call to action, increase rankings, keywords, SEM, SEO, Social Media, useful content, Webmarketing123
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July 30th, 2010
For those of you who missed our webinar on BingHoo! or want a refresher, here’s a brief recap of Wednesday’s presentation. Big thanks to Antonio, Travis and Ben for leading the way on this one—but more importantly, to everyone who tuned in. Thank you for your questions and comments – we appreciate the constant participation!
The subject of this week’s Webmarketing123 webinar was the emerging alliance between Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo search engines. We have to stress the fact that although the two companies are teaming up for many SEO, PPC and web search purposes, this alliance is not to be misconstrued as a merger between Microsoft and Yahoo. BingHoo!, as it’s being called, will maintain the Yahoo interface, while all organic searches for web, images, video and queries, as well as paid search results, will be powered by Bing.
In addition to the 5 Pillars of SEO (Keywords, Site Content, Meta Content, URL’s, and In-bound Links) that we have discussed at length in other webinars, a few major points to take away from Wednesday’s BingHoo! webinar are as follows:
- In the next year, as the alliance unfolds, focus more on optimizing for Bing than Yahoo. Be sure to have Bing Webmaster Tools installed.
- After the transition, Bing will represent roughly 30% of overall search queries.
- Incorporate and understand your new Bing webmaster tools and pay close attention to how the Bing Spiders crawl through your searches!
And here are a few tips on preparation for the new BingHoo! alliance:
- Continue to place your main focus on Google, a.k.a. the King. Typically, what Google does is followed by Yahoo and Bing.
- Look to optimize your searches using Bing algorithms – obtain “exact” domain matches whenever possible.
- Keep in mind that Bing favors sub-domain or root-domain keywords, so be sure that your domain names are effectively optimized.
- As always, be sure to obtain fresh in-bound links from a diverse array of sites. The greater variety of in-bound linkage that you have, the more traffic your site will receive.
As the effects of this alliance reveal themselves, the most important thing is to stay current on your company’s optimization. Look into in the future and plan for the long-term by planting the seeds for the release of new products within your keywords. Keep up with the pulse of your company’s keyword selection—it’s good practice to run a quarterly review of your keyword basket. Also, make sure that you’re in touch with your consumers and are able to effectively identify the language they use in regards to your company and products, as well as your industry as a whole.
With that said, keep your links fresh, keep your site content relevant and substantial, and optimize, optimize, optimize. SEO is the best way to boost traffic to your site!
Thanks again to everyone who participated in this week’s webinar. Next Wednesday’s webinar will be on integrating your SEO with social media. To sign up for next week’s webinar, please visit http://bit.ly/Web123-Webinar –it’s going to be a good one!
- Seth
Tags: 5 pillars, Bing, Bing-Hoo!, Google, in-bound links, PPC, SEO, Webinar, Webmarketing123, Yahoo
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May 28th, 2010
Yesterday’s webinar was all about the ABC’s of keywords optimization. Or as Travis puts it: “How much is that keyword worth to you?”
KEYWORDS are the FOCAL POINT of your SEO efforts. So naturally, identifying your highest impact keywords, and then strategically incorporating them into your site are crucial to your SEO success.
Keywords fall into two buckets: Head match and long-tail match. Head Match keywords are general searches, like “shoes” or “cookies”, whereas long-tail match keywords are more descriptive searches, like “women’s dress shoes” or “chocolate chip cookies”. Because long-tail keywords are more specific, they are better matched to the searchers needs, have less competition than generic head match keywords, and therefore can produce a high volume of impressions.
The first step in maximizing sales from SEO is setting the right keywords. This means focusing on a short and ideal list of key phrases your sales prospects and customers use to find you.
On May 5th or 6th 2010, depending on where you live, Google changed its search results page. One of the changes included the Google Wonder Wheel, a keyword expansion tool which shows related searches to your current search inquiry. The Wonder Wheel is an incredible tool and particularly helpful with finding other options for keywords.
Using the example that Travis used during the webinar, let’s say your company is in conveyor services.
In Google, search “conveyor systems” and on the left side of your screen click on “Wonder Wheel”.
Here, you can see other keyword options, to help narrow your search. Since you are in the industrial sector, click on “Industrial Conveyor Systems”.
Boom! Now you have six other keyword options to help optimize your search. We’ll go with “belt conveyors”.
Other Key Tools and Highlights:
- Google Insights – diagnose keyword search trends & its popularity in geographical regions
- Google Analytics – helps you understand what your customers are typing in to find your website, and which keywords you need to push to optimize, or if you need to start a PPC campaign
- Make sure that your company‘s terminology is in line with your customer’s terminology—the keywords they search for should be the ones you’re optimizing for!
- Keyword selection is your foundation for optimization. Keyword selection takes 2-3 weeks, in order for the account management team, analysts, and engineering teams to understand your keyword selection base.
Choosing the right keywords are the KEY to success—wow, that was cheesy…but you get the point. See you at the next webinar!
Tags: Google, Google analytics, Google insights, head match, Highlights, keyword selection, keywords, long-tail keywords, SEO, Webinar, wonder wheel
Posted in Google Updates, Search Engine Optimization, Webinar Highlights | No Comments »
May 13th, 2010
Anchor
We talk a lot about links around here, both internal links and inbound links. In today’s Introduction to SEO webinar, SEO Linking Essentials: How to Generate Inbound Links, Travis got into the nitty-gritty of the process.
Anchor text is a little like the outlet that links plug into. If your outlet is poor, you’re not going to get good performance from your link because it won’t have reliable power. Using your carefully-chosen keywords as anchor text for relevant inbound links gets the amps flowing. As tempting as it is to write copy for your site that tells people to click here and here, it is much better to give them an idea of where they are going, say, Grand Canyon or Great Barrier Reef. That way you don’t lose your visitors and you don’t confuse the crawlers.
Just for fun: anchors.
Tags: Blogs, Google spiders, Highlights, keywords, SEO, Webinar, Webmarketing123
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April 29th, 2010
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
Posted in Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Webinar Highlights, Webmarketing123.com | No Comments »
April 22nd, 2010
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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April 21st, 2010
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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April 14th, 2010
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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April 8th, 2010
“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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March 31st, 2010
Today’s webinar, Long Tail Versus Short Tail Keywords, made me think of Indiana Jones. (No, not because of the spiders crawling all over the webpages!) In the opening credits with the sepia map in the background, the little plane traces its red line from exotic location to remote landing to middle of nowhere to the exact right spot to find the lost ark.
If Indy had used Google, he might have started by typing in “ark.” It’s a short-tail keyword, a mere three letters. After paging through a zillion pages of Noah’s ark replicas, complete with zebras and chimpanzees, he’d get a little frustrated, but instead of lashing out at his trusty laptop with his whip, he’d get more specific. He’d try typing “ark of the covenant.” His little airplane is getting closer. He still has to stop to rebut the scurrilous claims of Dr. Rene Belloq on Wikipedia, but that takes mere moments. Then he tries the long tail search for “ark of the covenant Cairo” and Google gives him a handy amulet with an address. His plane arrives and now all he has to do is beat the Nazis, survive the snakes, and rescue the girl.
Indy, like most searchers, is getting savvier in his techniques. He’ll be quicker to find the temple of doom and the holy grail. He’ll breeze right by the film versions of Doom and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. By the time he gets to looking for the crystal skull, it’s a wonder the search takes long enough to film.
Similarly, the purveyors of lost arks and the like can make themselves easier to find by optimizing for exactly the kind of long tail keywords Dr. Jones used in his research. While there are relatively few archaeologists and evil empires searching for precious relics, those who search for “ark of the covenant Cairo” are ready to buy.
Tags: Blogs, E-Commerce, eCommerce, Google, keywords, SEO, Webinar, Webmarketing123
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