Posts Tagged ‘Small Business SEO’

Successful Web Marketing | Increase Website Visibility | Web Marketing Ideas

Marketing Practicality | January 31, 2010 in Internet Marketing | Comments (11)

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Successful Web Marketing

This is the third article of a three part series on Successful Web Marketing – this article provides web marketing ideas on how to increase website visibility. Because, at the end of the day, no matter how good your content is, what does it matter if no one can find your website (and your content)?

How to Increase Website Visibility

In order to successfully increase your website’s visibility you will need to learn certain tools. Like most things – you will be able to pick up a basic knowledge of these skills with a moderate time investment. If you want to develop expert-level skills, count on 1,000’s of hours for each of these web marketing tactics – or hire a qualified professional. The following 5 tactics can be employed to increase visibility to your website – generating more web traffic – and exposure to that valuable content you have already created.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #1 – Search Engine Optimization – SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of developing and managing your website so it ranks well for targeted search terms in the major search engines. An effective SEO marketing strategy will significantly increase traffic to your website. Search engine optimization consists of both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. I strongly recommend you perform search engine optimization within the search engines guidelines if you intend to build a website for the long haul. When done effectively, search engine optimization is the best tactic in your toolbox to increase website visibility – and a critical component of successful web marketing. Don’t overlook this web marketing idea. And use a proven, qualified SEO marketing consultant if you’re not sure how to do it internally.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #2 – Pay per Click Marketing – PPC

But like most things, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket, so if you completely rely on SEO for website visibility, you may be very disappointed if a search engine that sends you a large amount of organic traffic changes an algorithm or otherwise stops sending you the website traffic you were accustomed to. Pay per Click Marketing (also called paid search or PPC) involves targeting certain keywords and paying for search engine listings. This is a great tactic to increase visibility to your website, but of course costs money. So carefully evaluate your marketing metrics and monitor your PPC campaign performance. It only makes sense to carry out a PPC marketing campaign if it produces a positive ROI.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #3 – Social Media

Social media continues to gain momentum as a tool for increasing website visibility as well as developing online relationships with your customers or prospects interested in your products and services. Social media also ties in with search engine optimization as it provides a medium where your website can garner inbound links, thus increasing your website visibility.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #4 – Referring Websites

When I say referring websites, I mean websites that link to your website and direct traffic to your website by means of an inbound link. This also ties in with SEO, but if you build up a network of quality, referring websites that are synergistic with your website, you can increase visibility to your website and quite likely, improve your conversion rates. Generating a network of referring websites takes work; it’s best to reach out to other webmasters and establish a level of trust before simply asking someone for a link.

Increase Website Visibility Idea #5 – Networking

Old fashioned networking and personal relationships can go a long way for small businesses trying to increase website visibility. Think about who could link to your website – starting with your personal network. Vendors, customers, suppliers, business contacts, friends, consultants – there are likely a host of people you already know that have a business website. If you already have an established level of trust, and it makes sense, why not ask that person for a link in to your website?

Successful Web Marketing – A Blend of Old and New Marketing

In today’s competitive landscape, successful web marketing really requires a blend of old and new marketing tactics. Staying on top of rapidly changing technology and how it impacts your business market efforts is critical to successful web marketing.
Ask yourself:

  1. Are you getting the most out of your search engine optimization?
  2. Have you fully tested pay per click marketing?
  3. Are you effectively using social media marketing?
  4. Do you know the top ten websites referring traffic to your website?
  5. Do you routinely discuss web marketing with your network?

If you take these 5 web marketing ideas and deploy them effectively. you will see positive results. In order to increase website visibility, you need to work at it, or hire someone who will. Successful web marketing depends on knowing what to do, how to do it and then putting in the hard work to ensure success. So get going!

View the first article in the “Successful Web Marketing Ideas” series:

Web Marketing Ideas

View the second article in the “Successful Web Marketing Ideas” series:

Creating Valuable Content

By Marketing Practicality

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Web Marketing Ideas | Successful Web Marketing | Creating Valuable Content

Marketing Practicality | January 27, 2010 in Internet Marketing | Comments (2)

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Web Marketing Ideas – Creating Valuable Content

This is the second article of a three part series on Successful Web Marketing and focuses on creating valuable content for your website visitors. Here are some web marketing ideas for creating valuable content.

Creating Valuable Content – Target Your Audience

Are you in touch with what your website visitors are looking for? There are ways to monitor this within your Analytics program, i.e. your website bounce rate, time spent on website, number of web pages visited, etc. But Google Analytics also provides a way to identify all the organic keywords your visitors used to visit your website. When you review these terms, are the keywords in line with how you view your website content?

If so that’s great – but even still, you can analyze these terms to find hidden gems for creating valuable content – especially the terms that carry a high bounce rate.
To target your audience – simply identify what your website visitors are already looking for when they come to your website, but appear to exit the website quickly. Then develop valuable content around the topics your website visitors are really looking for.

Additionally, creating valuable content that is related to your website and is routinely read by your visitors is great way to reinforce the strong areas of your website content.

Successful Web Marketing – Content that Gets Seen

So now you have some general ideas about why visitors come to your website and the search terms they use to find content on your website. So what specifically should you write about? When creating valuable content, the targets your audience and gets read, I recommend the following web marketing ideas:

  1. Target content based on search volume
  2. Be honest and open
  3. Provide real value

Web Marketing Idea #1 – Target Content for Search Terms

Before you sit down to write an article, use some of the readily available tools out there to refine your targeted search terms. The keyword selection strategy is an important part of creating valuable content. Identify specific keywords by typing your general terms into a tool like Google’s Keyword Tool. While not precise, it will help you narrow down terms that have search volume your website can effectively rank for. If your site is brand new or isn’t an authority in its niche – attempting to rank for a term with 500,000 searches per month is going to lead to disappointment.

Web Marketing Idea #2 – Develop Content Openly and Honestly

Your website visitors are taking valuable time to read your content. And most times, they can tell if your content is genuine or simply fluff.

So I recommend you communicate your message clearly, openly and honestly. My preference is only to develop original content based on my experience, content that I can stand behind and have personally witnessed in practice. I don’t scrape or steal content from other websites but if I see great website content that I can stand behind, I’ll cite it and provide a link to that website.

Simply put, be honest and transparent with your website content.

Web Marketing Idea #3 – Provide Real Value

Creating valuable content needs to add value. Once you draft website content – reread it and ask yourself if your website visitors make take away a few nuggets that will actually help them. For example, my tips to use Google Analytics and Google’s Keyword Tool to target your content will result in web pages that get read. Make sure you add value to your readers if you want to develop a website for the long term.

Successful Web Marketing – Creating Valuable Content

So that’s part 2 in the series of successful web marketing, which focuses on creating valuable content for your website visitors. The next article on web marketing ideas will focus on gaining visibility to your website and how the new online marketing is really a blend of the old and the new.

Read the first article here:

Successful Web Marketing Ideas and Advice – Part 1

Or the next article:

Increase Website Visibility

From Marketing Practicality

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Web Marketing Ideas | Web Marketing Advice | Successful Web Marketing

Marketing Practicality | January 25, 2010 in Internet Marketing | Comments (8)

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Successful Web Marketing Ideas and Advice Part 1

Looking for successful web marketing ideas? Here’s some advice on how to effectively promote your business on the web.

First you need a business and a website. You’ve done that but you are not satisfied with the quantity and / or quality of leads your website is generating, so far you web marketing ideas aren’t so successful. Here’s what to do.

Web Marketing Ideas

I’ve broken down these web marketing ideas into three main categories: Web Marketing, Web Design and Web Marketing Process. Consider applying this web marketing advice as you grow your online business presence.

Successful Web Marketing

SEO – or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing the organic (not paid) listings in search engines for targeted terms. Learn how to do this yourself (plan on invest 1,000’s of hours to do it very well) or hire someone to do it for you. Don’t commit the sin of developing a beautiful, content-rich website that no one can find because this step was omitted. SEO applies to both on page optimization and off page optimization. If you only take one piece of web marketing advice, take this: optimize your website for search engines.

Pay per Click Marketing – Google AdWords being the most common, but Bing and Yahoo have their own paid search marketing platforms. Paid search marketing (pay per click marketing or PPC) is a way to quickly generate targeted traffic to your website at a cost you control. The advantage is the immediate traffic; the disadvantage is you pay for every click.

Social Media – This is one of the fastest growing areas of web marketing. There are numerous websites – the heavyweights being Facebook and Twitter but the list is vast and most sites have their own twist on social interaction via the internet. While many find this a difficult area to monetize, the value of the inbound links (in most cases) is certainly a plus, and it creates another channel to communicate your product or service.  (Note the social media links at the bottom of this post).

Create a Blog – By creating a blog you have content that is easily shared throughout the web, allowing you to link to other blogs, and of course have them link in to your website. As your popularity increases you will generate more inbound links and a following of people that are interested in your products, services and content. Plus the content management systems of blogs make it very easy to organize and create new web pages, without knowledge and experience in coding a website.

Networking – Not just networking through the web, but also through your (human) contacts. Networking, especially for small businesses is one of the best ways to build awareness of your website and your products or services. If you educate your network on web marketing (and they own websites) you can also generate traffic through that relationship.  Remember to give more than you receive – it will come back to you.

Quality Content – This will be covered in more detail with the next article in this series, but providing valuable, original content will play a large role in the success of your web marketing efforts. Create valuable content and create it often. Adding a page a day for a year is sound web marketing advice. Sound like a lot of work? It is – but like most things in life that are worth achieving, it takes effort.

Website Design

Website Design – If possible, hire a professional web designer to develop a great looking site.   Successful web marketing, in my opinion, is more by the marketing items I listed above – but good design goes hand in hand with good marketing and quality content.

Website Structure – Your website should be easily navigable – meaning any page on the website can be accessed in two clicks or less. The website navigation should be clean and intuitive. I like to create logical groupings of categories within clients’ websites. The web pages within each grouping interlink to one another so it’s clear to both users and search engines that all related web pages are contained within their logical grouping. Avoid making web pages that run too deep – no more than 4 directory levels in a URL, in fact, the fewer the better. Also, create websites that load quickly.

Contact Form – If you don’t have one, you need one – that simple. Especially if you plan on running paid search marketing. Create a contact form on your website.

Practical Web Marketing Ideas

Granted, this is a partial list of web marketing ideas but diligently applying this web marketing advice will result in successful web marketing. In part two of this Web Marketing Ideas series, we’ll cover how to develop valuable content that targets the type of visitors you want to attract to your website.

Related Resources:

7 Ways Internet Marketing Can Supercharge Your Small Business

Read the next articles in the series here:

Successful Web Marketing Ideas: Creating Valuable Content

Increase Website Visibility

From Marketing Practicality

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Search Engine Optimization and Meta Tags:
Meta Keywords | Meta Description

Marketing Practicality | January 17, 2010 in SEO, Small Business Marketing | Comments (8)

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This comes up far too frequently when I speak with clients or potential clients, so I thought it would be useful to cover the role of common meta tags and search engine optimization (SEO) – elements like meta keywords and the meta description.  When you see a listing on a search engine – here’s what the title tag (which is not a meta tag) and the meta description commonly look like – search engines don’t display meta keywords.

The Importance of Meta Keywords and SEO

Meta Keywords Tag is not important in search engine optimization – or not in the way you want it to be.  Many high ranking websites don’t even use them.  I admit, I still use them sometimes, perhaps it’s just an old habit and often clients insist meta keywords are important – but consider the following if you choose to use the meta keywords tag:

  1. Keep the keywords short – 5 or so is fine
  2. Use relevant meta keywords – don’t add keywords that aren’t in the web page’s content
  3. Meta keywords should be unique to each page
  4. Understand meta keywords won’t help the ranking of your page but overuse or misuse can negatively impact rankings
  5. Your competitors can easily view your meta keywords and know which terms you are “trying” to target or rank for – think about that

If you, your SEO resource, or staff thinks that meta keywords are a way to improve your search engine rankings – well, they are not.

The Importance of the Meta Description and SEO

The meta description however is an important meta element – because, as shown in the picture above, the meta description is what search engines typically display to describe your website.  While the meta description does not have significant SEO value, it does influence whether or not someone may click on your website’s search engine listing.

For that reason alone, care should be taken to craft relevant, meaningful description that are unique for each page.

In some cases, a search engine will choose to display a description other than what you have carefully worded as your meta description.  The most common example is Yahoo! is a Yahoo Directory description (if you have one) or search engines electing to use a DMOZ description (if you have one). Though I have even seen Google use alt tags as a web page description.  Yahoo! directory and DMOZ listings can be easily controlled (by using another meta tag!).  If Google is using other on-page elements for your description you need to understand why and fix it.

Your Website’s Title Tag and Search Engine Optimization – SEO

OK – the title tag (which is not a meta tag) has significant search engine optimization value and they influence whether someone will click on your website’s search engine listing.  So website titles should be crafted carefully and well, to target the intended keywords, provide a meaningful description of your website’s page and influence someone to click through your website’s search engine listing.

The title tag is probably the most important on-page seo element and one of the easiest to modify and improve.

SEO Marketing Services – Pricing and Value

So if you are shopping a search engine optimization partner, and you see a variety of different rates and service levels, and you don’t really understand what kind of value you are getting for your investment, I’ll offer these points for your consideration.

  • If the seo service provider is planning on changing your meta tags, title tag, submitting your website to a bunch of search engines and directories – the rate is probably low, for a reason.  There will be little return (albeit some) for that sort of service.
  • If your seo marketing resource is charging you a high rate for doing the above, look elsewhere.
  • Many seo marketing agencies offer tiered plans – and while it’s good to see a list of what will be done for your marketing investment, understand you are purchasing a pre-packaged seo plan – which may not fit the specific needs of your business.
  • If your resource provides seo marketing services which include on-page and off-page optimization; stays current with search engine trends; understands the different algorithms and has a successful track record with other clients – you may be on to something.  If you can effectively determine that seo provider’s professionalism and responsiveness, well then, now you may really be on to something.  Just be sure to use a qualified seo marketing consultant.

Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization – Recap

So to summarize, here’s the real search engine optimization value of meta tags:

Meta Keywords – They will not help your search engine rankings. If used improperly, they may have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

Meta Description – Important for your search engine listing and can influence whether or not people click on the listing and visit your website.

Title Tag – Very important for both search engine optimization as well as gaining traffic from search engine listings.

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Small Business Website Help – Website Security Risks

Marketing Practicality | January 3, 2010 in SEO, Small Business Marketing | Comments (2)

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Website Security Risks

OK – it’s 2010, are you considering your resolutions for your small business website? If you are looking for small business website help, one of the things near the top of your list should be website security risks.

Do You Backup Your Small Business Website?

No one wants another task added to their list, but regularly backing up your website can save a lot of headaches if your website gets hacked.  I have had several clients come to me because their search engine rankings dropped significantly, which often results in a drop in traffic to their small business’ website, which results in a loss of revenue.  Having a small business website can be your primary means of revenue so I strongly recommend your consider the website security risks associated with the responsibility of owning a website.

Blogs and Website Security Risks

WordPress can be a great help to your small business website.  It is an extremely robust and useful, open source blogging platform.  But with popularity comes a price.  WordPress blogs have several website security risks – hackers have automated the process.  In fact most clients that come to me for help with their small business website (after a major drop in rankings) – have had some sort of website security breach.

Here is a great article on best practices for managing a small business WordPress blog:

Triple “P” Of Total WordPress Security

Website Security Risks and Your Small Business Website Host

Have you checked with the company that hosts your small business website?  Do they regularly backup your website?  Are you comfortable that your website could be completely restored in the event of a malware problem?  If not, I recommend you check with them and don’t leave anything to chance.  Backing up your website yourself can save you a lot of hassle if your hosting company isn’t there for you when you need them (or you didn’t understand their policies… remember all that fine print?).

An Ounce of Prevention

It’s an old saying but good sayings get old for a reason.  So if you are looking for small business website help first consider your website security risks. Then move on to the fun stuff like SEO, Google AdWords and other small business marketing techniques.

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