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Lee Odden of TopRankMarketing.com and TopRankBlog.com – Shares Great Information:

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Tuesday, Lee Odden, CEO of Top Rank Online Marketing, spoke with me by phone from SES in New York. Lee spoke about several topics at SES as listed on TopRankBlog.com. I covered several of the topics with him in the full MP3 audio listed near the bottom of this post. Lee also talked with me for a few minutes about Twitter. That’s what you’ll find listed to the right in the image. Simply click the arrow to listen to what Lee had to say about Twitter. Then, enjoy the full MP3 interview later on in this post: Click the arrow Read the Rest...

Marketing Blog Posts: Real Marketing Strategy vs. Gambling

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I saw a few excellent blog posts this week that echoed common pet peeves of mine. I have frequently observed businesses engaging in marketing practices that not only lack any strategy whatsoever, but also any mechanism for tracking whether they work or not. The three specific areas to which I’m referring: Organic SEO, social media, and press releases. I could name plenty more, but these three should give you plenty to chew on. Organic SEO Gabriella Sannino’s SearchEngineJournal article hits one nail right on the head: setting clear expectations for organic SEO and content writing. Anyone who asks you to Read the Rest...

Who Said That?

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Here are the new and noteworthy blog posts from this week! 3 Creative Ways to Spread Content to People On the Go (HubSpot). If you’re using web content as part of your marketing strategy, it’s important to use a delivery mechanism that makes it easy for people to respond to you. Read this quick post for examples. Businesses on Facebook Need to Include Their Location (WebProNews). Do you have a Facebook business page? If so, make sure you’ve added your location so as not to lose followers. This article explains how it works. 5 Filters Everybody Should Use In Their Read the Rest...

International SEO:Domains, Subdomains Or Subfolders

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**Note: This is a guest post written by one of our readers. For more information on how to submit a guest post, please read our guest posting guidelines. When creating a site designed for an international market, there are multiple hosting issues to question. Multilingual sites must be accessible to global audiences, differentiate between regions, languages and unique country content, yet still be relevant to individual as well as global searches. But as there are a number of different hosting options (using root domains, subdomains and subfolders) which is the best approach to take when implementing an international SEO campaign? Which Read the Rest...

Cha-Ching! The Cost of Bringing SEO In-House Vs. Outsourcing

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David and I were recently kicking around some numbers about what it would cost for a company to hire all of the people needed to bring an SEO team in house. Wow. Even we were a bit surprised at what we found. Because SEO is comprised of so many different moving parts that must each be powered by a different type of professional, it’s no wonder that the majority of SEO is outsouced!

To bring SEO in-house and accomplish the job successfully, a company would need at the minimum a team that includes:

  • Project manager
  • Web programmer
  • Copywriter
  • Link building specialist
  • Graphic designer
  • AdWords/PPC Specialist

Add to the cost of all of these people’s salaries and benefits the fact that you’ve got to keep the team educated; SEO is a constantly changing business. For us in the industry, education means thousands of dollars worth of conferences each year, (an average SEO conference costs about $2,000- and that’s just the attendance fee), meeting with other SEO consultants, and a great deal of time spent on research.

Outsourcing means that companies have access to a whole group of expert professionals at a slice of the cost. Our team alone consists of

  • 3 SEO Industry Expert Trainers & Consultants
  • 3 Degreed Copywriters and/or Ad Agency Executives
  • 1 Web Developer
  • 1 Web Designer
  • 1 Link Building Expert
  • 1 Pay Per Click Expert
  • And a handful of other professionals that we routinely count on

That’s a lot of knowledge! I know David has worked for year to build his team up to where it is now and it took a lot of trial and error along the way. With the exception of perhaps small companies with very limited budgets and very large companies with a heavy full-time workload, SEO is one of those things that just makes more sense to outsource than it does to try and build in-house.

Google hell?

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google-hell-evil

The SEO blogosphere is abuzz with talk about this Forbes article: Condemned to Google Hell, talking about Google’s Supplemental Index (AKA “Google Hell”).

Reading the article, I was struck immediately by one thing: what were these site owners doing “depending” on Google’s organic search results for their business? No matter how long a site has been perched at #1, the possibility always exists that a new competitor or a change in the algorithm can come along and knock you down.

Personally, I would be scared to death if my business depended on something over which I had so little control. What was their backup plan? And if they didn’t have one, why didn’t they?

And before anybody gets all up in arms over pages in the Supplemental Index in the first place, it might be a good idea to read what Googler Matt Cutts has to say on the subject.

Turns out it’s not about spamming, and it’s not about duplicate content. According to Matt, the major factor that puts pages in the Supplemental Index is low PageRank — basically having few, if any, links of value pointing to those pages.

What to do? Don’t go exchanging links with everybody who comes along the pike. It’s not about the quantity of your links, it’s about the quality of your links. As Matt says:

Reciprocal links by themselves are not automatically bad, but we have communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking.

Just imagine what that one site owner could have accomplished if he’d taken the time and energy spent building pages to hold 329 different categories of reciprocal links, and instead turned that toward improving his site’s content and usability! Better websites tend to attract higher-quality links, after all. And higher quality links keep you out of the Supplemental Index.

This ain’t rocket science, folks… Make a better website = attract better quality links. Base your “site optimization” campaign on exchanging links with every Tom, Dick and Harry who has a “link partners” page = end up in the Supplemental Index.

So, what have you done to make your website more link-worthy today?

Multiple Streams of Clicks

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armsI’m sure most of you have heard of the book “Multiple Streams of Income”. The author points out that you should not rely on only one stream of income because if that one goes away you are left with nothing. The same holds true for clicks to your website. You want to have multiple ways people are finding your website.

Here is a list of some of the ways people could be finding you:

  1. Natural search engine rankings
  2. Search engine ad programs (AdWords in Google)
  3. Articles (some you have written, some other people have written)
  4. Forums (give good advice to a tough question and people will find you)
  5. Paid ads on other sites
  6. E-Books (write one with links to your site and then give it away)
  7. Blogs (yours and other people’s)
  8. Social Networking sites like Digg, MyBlogLog, FastPitch, StumbleUpon
  9. Press Releases (that you distribute or have someone distribute for you)
  10. Printed Books (write one and put your website address in it)
  11. News Stories (make it easy for the press to find information about you on your site)
  12. News Letters (electronic)
  13. News Letters (printed)
  14. Your e-mail signature
  15. Your business card
  16. Magnetic sign on your car
  17. News Papers (printed, run an ad with your website address in it)
  18. Radio (make sure your url is easy to say and spell)
  19. TV ad or news
  20. Fliers
  21. Posters
  22. Shirts
  23. Hats
  24. Coffee cups
  25. Pens
  26. Podcasts
  27. Link exchange
  28. Link bait links
  29. Friends and family (make sure they know who might be interested in your site)
  30. Tattoo (not for the meek or weak and no I don’t have mine…yet)

You might not be able to afford all of these streams at the same time and it would be a very tough job keeping track of all of it at once, but, pick a few and go for it. Several of them only cost the time it takes you to put it together.

SEO in Five Simple Steps

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Despite what some people might think, search engine optimization (SEO) is not magic, and it’s not rocket science. Here, in a nutshell, are the five steps you need to follow to optimize your site for maximum search engine performance:

  1. Do keyword research and analysis to ensure you’re targeting truly useful phrases.
  2. Make sure the title tag of each page contains the primary (and if you can fit it in, the secondary) target phrase for that page.
  3. Write good, useful content for each page. Write for your human visitors, not for the search engines, but make sure the copy does contain your target phrase a time or two (or three or four).
  4. Set up internal navigation. Link your pages together using each page’s target phrase(s) in the anchor text of links pointing to the page.
  5. Seek out links from valuable, high-quality pages outside your site. Concentrate on pages likely to be visited by your target audience. Don’t get hung up on whether they’re straight one-way links or if they require you to reciprocate, and don’t get too crazy over whether they’re paid-for or free links. As long as the sites pointing to you are useful resources and attract the same crowd you want to have visiting your site, they’re good links to have. If you can get these other webmasters to use your desired target phrase in their link anchor text pointing toward you, that’s the icing on the cake.

See? Nothing to it. Now, of course, comes the hard part… the part where most webmasters trip up… putting in the necessary time and effort.

Good SEO is simple, but simple is not synonymous with effortless. If you want success, be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get to work!


Dealings With an Unscrupulous SEO

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bad seo practice

Yesterday when checking the rankings, we were surprised to see that a company we had never heard of came in and took over the #3 position that had been our client’s for months. Where did these people come from?

Well, after a little investigation, it became clear how they had jumped up so quickly and will ultimately fall off as fast as they came in. They were cheating big time with a bunch of hidden text (text the same color as the background) in the left and bottom border. Being a huge proponent of ethical search engine optimization, David was-let’s just say-not too thrilled by the news of this.

Our team notified the company about the issue, they most likely hired an SEO company and have no idea about the hidden text or if so, that it’s a major offense. Note that it is the #1 item on the SEO King’s list of bad SEO practices. Today the hidden text is gone. The site is still there, but I can almost guarantee that won’t be for long. I’ll keep you posted on this event.

There are few things more frustrating than playing against a cheat. If this company did hire an SEO company, that SEO company knew full well that hidden text is a big no-no. What’s worse is that they gambled their client’s right to exist on the search engines at all by trying to get a fast position.

Using “Trackbacks” to Improve Your Readership

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What the heck is a “trackback”? That’s the million dollar question I kept
asking myself as I watched

Traffic Secrets 2.0
by John Reese. For a nice little definition, I turn to
Wikipedia:

A Trackback is one of three types of

Linkbacks
, methods for

Web
authors to request notification when somebody

links
to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of
who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some

weblog
software programs, such as

WordPress
,

Movable Type
,

Typo
and

Community Server
, support automatic

pingbacks
where all the links in a published article can be

pinged
when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for
any kind of Linkback.

Understand Now? Trackbacks are often overlooked by bloggers who focus more on
looking at the number of people who are actually commenting on their blog. But
what about the people who are reading the blogs and then posting their own blogs
in response to something that someone else wrote? This is where trackbacks are
most useful.


How Trackbacks Work

wordpress-write-trackbacks

If you are out reading someone’s blog post and you really like it
and want to mention it in your own blog, click on the title of
the individual blog post. You will then see the page refresh with nothing else
but that blog post on it. Go to the top of the page, highlight the URL
and copy the link
(aka: permalink). You will then want to go back to
your own blog and paste the link into whatever it is you’re writing. So, for
example,

The other day, I was reading this really funny post from my friend

Sean Fallon
of Gizmodo…

In the wonderful world of blogging, whenever you end up “publishing” your
blog post with the link in it, it will automatically send a “ping” so whoever
you linked to to leave her a message that you did a trackback to them. Some
blogging software doesn’t do the trackbacks right away. You may have to read the
directions and/or contact the blog author to set it up.

If you are using WordPress and are linking to other bloggers who are using
WordPress as well,

trackbacks
are sent out automatically in the form of

pingbacks
.

Each blog is different, so make sure you read all of the directions for how
to set up and use trackbacks. They can be a great tool for increasing search
optimization for websites and blogs!

I Want My Money Back!

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You’ve probably heard it mentioned plenty of times by now, but the question never gets old it seems: What happens when an SEO company “promises” certain results for its clients but then the outcome is less than what was originally expected? Does the client walk away satisfied? Probably not. Do people end up getting sued? It’s a question that seems to be growing and will more than likely continue to be a cause for concern as increasing numbers of businesses and professionals are switching to the Internet as a form of marketing their presence.

money_back

So, what to do? Do we continue on in the pattern of thinking that “the customer is always right”? When you hire a professional to fix the plumbing in your house, you expect that at the end of the day, you will get the intended results that you want: ie. the toilet will work again. Therefore, it sort of makes sense that when you hire an SEO professional: ie. an Internet marketing company, you’ll get the intended results that you were guaranteed at the end of a certain amount of time. So, for instance, if you were told that you were going to have n amount of visitors to your site and that your rankings in Google would go up by a certain number, is it then unreasonable to expect results? Are the circumstances different? Some would argue that they are.

Flushing a Toilet is Easy; Flushing your Business Down With it is Not…

Flushing your toilet and flushing your business down with it both have one major difference: one stinks and the other one doesn’t. So, when things don’t work out as planned with your SEO company of choice- if you still haven’t moved up the ranks in Google- if you still haven’t received any leads from all of the marketing ploys- is it then ok to demand your money back? Take the poll below to find out what others think about the issue.

No Blog Left Behind: Think Like a Blogger!

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2313604137_9d929b834c

Delve into the mind of a blogger with me for a second. Why do people blog?
Well, for most of us, it’s to put

useful information
out there and hopefully

make a connection
with readers. In my mind, if I can read a blog or an
article that someone’s written and get something useful out of it-even if it’s
nothing more than a smile- then that person has done his/her job.

Blogging is meant to elicit a response from readers. Whether this means that
they will find out something that they didn’t know before, purchase a product or
service, or leave a comment saying that they disagree entirely, it is a way to
connect with others and create a buzz about something.

Keep it Short. Keep it Simple.

One of my pet peeves with blogging is what I refer to as “empty blog posts”.
These are the blogs you come across that are long (usually more than 400 words)
and don’t really capture your attention; they’re boring. If you’re going to
write a blog post (especially one that is lengthy), make sure that you have
something to say that will keep your readers captivated; otherwise, you’re just
wasting your time and theirs.

In my experience, I have found that most people who read blogs tend to prefer
ones that are shorter versus ones that are longer. If you know that you have a
lot of valuable information that you want to get out, why not break it
up? Split your post into a Part 1 and Part 2 and post them on different days. If
the content is well written and thought provoking, readers will want to
come back for the next in the series. This is preferable versus trying to shove
a ton of text/information down someone’s throat in one sitting. Even if you
break up your post with pictures, it’s not going to break up the fact that your
word count is creeping up to near 800 + words as your number of subscribed
readers is going down.

Why Hiring an SEO Company is better than doing it On Your Own

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seo

As you probably already know, search engine optimisation is incredibly important for your website. These days SEO is crucial for making sure that you reach your potential customers or leads. If your website isn’t optimised, you might be missing out on the exposure that comes with ranking highly. Optimising your website means making sure that it loads quickly, that it targets the most relevant keywords and that it ranks higher than others in your industry – which will greatly improve your online presence and increase your sales as a result.

You can choose to either do it yourself or hire a specialist SEO company to do the work for you. Some businesses choose to do their SEO work themselves, but there are many advantages to hiring an SEO company to do it on your behalf. Although it will cost a little more than doing it on your own, it’s well worth the money in the extra sales it will create. Here are some of the main benefits:

You Will See Results Faster

Learning to promote yourself and optimise your SEO can take years, as there are so many factors that you need to figure out and skills you need to learn, not to mention the fact that the rules are always changing and adapting. However, an SEO expert has already gone through this learning process and has an in depth understanding of SEO and how it works. You will see results faster thanks to their expertise and you will not have to waste time learning things through trial and error.

You Will Save Time and Stress

If you are a small business owner, you are probably really busy and there are 100 things on your to-do list. Why should you add one more thing when you don’t need to? SEO can be very time consuming, so it makes a lot of sense to subcontract it out to an expert SEO Company so that you can spend your valuable time doing other things that are important to the growth of your business.

Also working on SEO can be stressful – especially when you don’t know what you are doing. When you hire someone to take care of your SEO for you, you don’t have to worry about taking care of all of this stress – you can count on the experts to take care of it for you.

Avoid Penalties from Beginner Mistakes

When you first start out with SEO you are just learning the ropes and you will make a lot of mistakes. You will be learning the basics and you will be figuring things out from articles and blog posts, but essentially you will be teaching yourself with very little SEO training.

Sometimes this means using search engine optimisation techniques that are not effective or even frowned upon – simply because you don’t know any better. Major search engines will penalize your website if you don’t use the right SEO techniques, which could make it much more difficult to achieve a high ranking in the future. Consulting an SEO company could ensure that you avoid these mistakes in the future, or even before they occur.

The SEO Company Already Has the Technology

There is a lot of technology and specific programs involved in search engine optimisation. To buy all of these programs is expensive and to learn how to use them is time consuming. Another advantage of hiring an SEO company is that they will already have the SEO technology and know how to use it effectively.

The SEO Company is Up to Date

In order to be successful in SEO it is important to be up to date with the current trends and the changing algorithms of Google. Changes happen frequently and if you are not up to date with them you might risk doing something that goes against the algorithms of Google and negatively affecting your SEO.

These are just a few of the reasons why hiring an SEO company makes much more sense than trying to do things on your own. The right company will take the time to get to know your company and your SEO goals so that they can design a program that is ideal for your needs. Luckily, there are many great SEO companies out there that can provide you with highly skilled services, such as Dark Peak Digital. Check out the services that they have to offer and feel free to contact them if you have any more questions.

Some Things to Know about Search Engine Optimization Companies

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seo

If you want to learn about search engine optimization, you must understand its philosophy first. Basically, the goal is to improve your brand identity and your online business. Good SEO companies focus only on what is known as ‘white hat’ methods, which means they follow the rules. While their counterpart, ‘black hat’ methods, may get you to the top of Google in a day, they will also ensure you get yourself penalized, to the point of being banished from the search engines altogether.

What to Look for in a Search Engine Optimization Company

If you want to work with a search engine optimization company, there is more to look for than just white hat strategies. Some of the things to think about include:

  1. What is their specific expertise and optimization methodology? Some companies can only use basic HTML and work on static websites, for instance. Others go much further and know all types of programming language and they focus on both static and dynamic sites. The top SEO companies also use various eCommerce interfaces and packages and integrate these into your website. Naturally, the more a company can do for you, the more it is likely to cost as well.
  2. What piecemeal services do they offer and what is the depth of their optimization? Basic companies may say they perform SEO, but they don’t really. Rather, they automatically or manually submit your site to the various directories and search engines. This is a really cheap process, since they don’t actually do anything in-depths like content development, linking or coding. As a result, these services are also very cheap. However, this is something you can really do yourself. One level up from this is an SEO company that focuses a bit more on marketing by writing fresh content, building links, analyzing keywords, editing code and more. They may even do a bit of work on what is known as ‘off site optimization’, like submitting articles and press releases and writing blogs. Then, there is the top level, and most expensive, type of SEO. They do all of the above, as well as analyzing and tracking your conversion rates. This means they look at what does and doesn’t work for you and make adjustments to ensure what doesn’t work is changed. It is also important to understand that some companies float in between these three. What they do is create packages that suit your personal needs. In other words, you pay separately for all the different services.

Is SEO something you can simply do yourself? Probably not. While we live in an age where companies are doing all they can to keep costs down, you also have to remember that investing in services like SEO will give you a tremendous return on investment. Even the lowest levels of SEO, submitting your site to directories, takes time and a degree of knowledge that you may not have yourself, unless your particular niche is in online marketing.

The Best Ways of Attracting New Visitors to Your Website

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search-engine-optimization

So you’ve built a website for your business, whether you’re a freelancer or you’ve started a new company. Now you need to figure out how to actually go about attracting new visitors to your website. After all, what is the point of having a website if nobody knows about it and visits it to learn about your products and services?

If you are serious about getting your website on the map and making it rank higher in relevant search engine results, continue reading for a few valuable tips on how to start attracting new visitors to your site.

Use a Pay Per Click Advertising Campaign

Pay per click advertising is hugely popular today because it is a great way to advertise your website online, hone in on your target audience, and get more click-throughs to your website. The ultimate goal is to get more people to realize your site exists, visit it, and convert into purchasers so you can increase your bottom line.

The great thing about pay per click advertising is the fact that you can change your tactics at any time if you notice that a certain strategy is not working. You can even target your audience right down to their zip code if you are a local business in search of really local customers.

And another great thing about pay per click advertising is the fact that you only pay when your ad is clicked. Rather than spend a lot of money on an advertising campaign that never gets clicked on, with PPC, you are only paying when the ad is actually effective.

If you decide to take this route, you should definitely consider signing up with professional Pay Per Click Management Services, as they can help you create the very best PPC campaign that will lead to the highest numbers of visitors to your website.

Use Search Engines to Direct Traffic to Your Website

In addition to PPC advertising, you can also target search engines themselves and try to get visitors via organic searches and directories. Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines can provide you with free traffic every day if you know how to implement the use of keywords throughout your website, and if you know how to apply the latest search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and tools to your site as well.

To get a top ranking in search engine results, you will need to suggest or submit your website to the search engines first. This means that you have to give them the details about your website that they need to know. In this way, the search engine spiders, which are the automated programs that search the web, will actually find your website and display it in search results.

In addition to submitting your website to search engines, you can also hire an SEO expert who can help you tweak everything from the content on your site, to the meta tags and descriptions, and even the links throughout your website, in order to increase the chances that your site will appear on top when users search for keywords that are relevant to the products and services that your company offers.

Add a Blog to Your Website

Another way that you can easily increase the number of visitors that come to your website on a daily basis is by creating a blog that is filled with valuable free content. Every blog post should be optimized, too, with the appropriate keywords and links in order to make their way to higher search engine rankings.

Make sure that the content on your blog is always relevant to your business. If you are a pet care company, for example, you can discuss myriad topics related to keeping pets happy and healthy. The key here is to provide content that people are interested in reading, and content that people are actually searching for. Therefore, it shouldn’t only be about your business all the time. Instead, it should prove that your company is filled with experts who are authorities in their field.

Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog and join your mailing list, too, as this is a great way to stay in touch with your audience and share more tips with them or give them access to things like special discounts.

By combining the best of PPC advertising with SEO for better search engine rankings, and a blog that provides visitors with valuable content they can’t wait to share, you’ll be able to attract a lot more people to your website.


How to Use SEO Techniques to Effectively Brand Your New Business

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search-engine-optimization

If you’re going to be an internationally renowned entrepreneur and business professional, you’ve got to constantly be thinking outside the lines of what constitutes “standard operating procedure.” Even a purely local business needs to advertise itself as if it were competing in a much expanded international market place.

You’ve got to be always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to define, redefine and “brand” your business in such a manner that it stands head and shoulders above its peers at all times. Using SEO techniques to effectively brand your new business is a matter of skill, moxy, common sense and a great deal of careful calculation and forethought. After all, many professionals, like Spiro Latsis, faced a lot of the same challenges when they started their own businesses.

What Should a New Business Owner Know about SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the means by which you get your official company website to rank as near as possible to the top of any search engine result. By doing so, you ensure that your business will get the exposure it needs to draw enough visitors to purchase your goods and services so that you can post a profit for all of your hard work. Without this valuable exposure, it’s very unlikely that your business will have a fair chance to survive in an increasingly competitive international marketplace.

Beyond merely defining what SEO is, you’ve got to be able to utilize these valuable techniques in order to “brand” your business in a successful manner. It isn’t enough to simply throw your hat into the ring and set up an official company site. You’ve got to use every technique in your playbook to draw people in and, once they’ve seen what you have to offer, keep them coming back for more.

Why Does Branding Your Business Set You up for the Future?

“Branding” your business basically boils down to giving it an identity, a reputation and an “image” that sets it apart from other competitors in your chosen field. Once you’ve established such an identity, you can rely on it when you decide to branch out into other areas. For example, the American rock group Kiss has such a reliable and well defined image as a musical entity that it can easily transfer its brand to countless merchandise items such as T-shirts, mugs, coasters, mouse pads, and many more.

You can use SEO techniques, such as keyword placement, content marketing and others, in order to position your business as an internationally recognized entity, but the point of all such activity is to brand it in the eyes and minds of the public. The two should be thought of simultaneously, rather than one succeeding the other. To accomplish both goals, you should be thinking in terms of branding via the content you provide on your website and various social media pages.

SEO Is the Key to the Creation of a Successful Brand

SEO is the key you need to successfully brand your business. By making maximum use of these techniques, you can coordinate your efforts on social media networks and your official website in order to create maximum exposure for your company. The sooner you master these techniques, the sooner you can look forward to a productive and profitable future.

10 Beginner but Effective SEO Techniques

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seo

If you want your website to get found, you have to engage in SEO (search engine optimization) techniques. It is possible to hire a search engine optimization company to do this work for you, but if you have only just started and you are on a budget, you won’t be able to do this. Luckily, there are quite a few things that you can do yourself. While these won’t give you the results a professional SEO company will get for you, it is an excellent way to get started and build up your resources so that you can hire an SEO company. Let’s take a look.

10 SEO Techniques You Can Implement Yourself

  1. Content marketing. You have to make sure new and relevant content is on your site at all times. You can write this yourself, by making sure that it is appealing and informative, as well as being relevant to what people are actually looking for.
  2. Attractive images and catchy headlines. People are very visual, particularly from behind a computer or smartphone screen. Your content has to look good, therefore. This can be achieved with fun images and catchy headlines.
  3. There is nothing worse than spelling and grammar mistakes. In fact, there are people out there who seek out mistakes on purpose just to make fun of people. Make sure, therefore, that you check everything for errors.
  4. Get a few guest bloggers. This isn’t necessarily something you can do yourself, or for free. However, it is much more affordable than SEO professionals and has a really good effect. Their name will immediately attract an audience to your site.
  5. Make sure your links are original. Try to write some really interesting articles, and get other websites to post them for you. Sometimes, you do have to pay for this as well. However, fees tend to be quite minimal, and you should also be able to find quite a few that don’t cost much.
  6. Work on your reputation. You have to build relationships with your customers, your suppliers, your partners and even your competition. You have to become known in person as well, so do go to conferences and more. Building a network of real people is as important as getting the digital stuff right.
  7. Help others. There are other people in the same situation as you, people who are just starting and who can’t afford a professional SEO company either. So help each other out a little bit, even if it is just by linking to each other.
  8. Crawl through your website using specially made software (many offer free trials) and see how the Google robots see it. In so doing, you can spot any problems and fix them.
  9. Have a look at your competition. What are they doing on their websites that you are not? Are they using social media in different ways than you? Are they making sudden changes to their site? While being a step ahead of them is probably impossible, making sure you do the same as they do is easy to achieve.
  10. Focus on social media. You won’t get anywhere without a Facebook and Twitter page for your site as well.

5 Simple Tricks to Perform On Page

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local seo

A lot of people struggle to understand exactly what search engine optimization (SEO) is, and how they can make it work in their favor. Essentially, by engaging in SEO tactics, you ensure that your website gets found when people use search engines. There are different elements to this, one of which is on-page SEO. These are some of the most important, as well as being some of the easiest to implement yourself. Below are some of the things that you need to consider.

Go Local

The first thing you have to do is make sure that you are found locally. Local SEO is one of the greatest buzzwords in internet marketing today and ensures that people in your geographical area can find you. Because so much internet usage is now through mobile, this is even more important. Simply adding the name of your town in a few places on your site is all you really need to do.

Page Titles

Next, you need to make sure that your page title is fit for purpose. It must include your main keyword in order to be found. You also have to make sure that each page has a unique title of its own.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are often forgotten, when they are actually vital to your overall SEO. Make sure that your keyword is included in this description. In so doing, you make sure not just that the search engines pick up on you, but that your viewers understand what you are about as well.

Meta Tags

Next, there are your tags, which you use to describe the content of your page. Through these, search engine bots get what you’re about. This is an important tool that has really good effects.

URL Structure

Make sure that your URL structure makes sense and is easy to use. It has to be readable by your visitors, and it must be clear what it refers to. This increases your rankings as well as organic traffic.

Internal Links

Last but not least, there are your internal links. These are very important in terms of making your website more visible. When you plan your own SEO strategy, these should be pretty high up on your list, as they will instantly rank your site higher.

With the above six SEO techniques, you can make a real difference to your page authority. As you can see, they are not overly complex techniques either, meaning you don’t have to be an online marketing expert to get it right. An added benefit is that, if you implement the above six techniques, your website will also function better. The search engines will find it easy to crawl through your site, thereby making your internal pages more relevant and driving more traffic to your site. Always make sure that your internal pages are relevant to the keyword you are using on them as well. While it is always better to hire an SEO export, this should be enough to get you started.

SEO or Social Media Marketing: Which Should You Master First?

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online-marketing

The landscape of internet marketing shifted when social media became very popular. Personal and business users are now leaving more digital footprints, and interacting with each other in (almost) real-time through social networks. Social media marketing became an interesting new internet marketing instrument to explore. The big question remains the same: which should you master first, SEO or social media marketing?

An Interesting Relationship

There is an interesting relationship between social media marketing and SEO. One cannot reach its full potential without the other. At the core of both internet marketing instruments are the contents you have on your site. Social media has a lot of impact on search engine rankings, while SEO can be very useful for better social networking performance.

As you can see, the relationship between social media marketing and SEO is an interesting one indeed. On one hand, you have the content of your site, fully optimized for better search engine rankings. A content or a page on your site will act as the anchor of both campaigns; it is where all users go to find out more about the topic.

On the other hand, you have social media and the users interacting with you through your social media pages. They share your content, have conversations about it and even engage you or your brand in live discussions. Social media marketing builds a community around your brand and adds sustainability to the marketing campaign in general.

So, which is more important?

Again, the answer to this question is simply: both. One isn’t more important than the other. In fact, both internet marketing instruments complement each other unlike anything before. The two work really well with each other; so well that you can optimize for both in one very fluid sweep.

When writing a title for your article, for instance, you can integrate the main keyword you are targeting for SEO. At the same time, you can keep the title short and catchy enough for it to be effective on social media. The same goes for the content itself. Search engine crawlers now prioritize readable content that users can quickly scan through. This type of content, interestingly, is also what social media users are looking for.

Let’s not forget that a lot of users are now using social networks to search for information. Instead of searching through Google, many now go to Twitter or Facebook to find something. Combining both SEO and social media marketing will give you the best results.

The Concept of Social SEO

In simple words, you need both. They are complimentary – very much so, in fact – and can be used to reach new heights as far as internet marketing goes. In fact, we’re seeing something a lot of experienced experts call social SEO, a modern concept where a site is optimized for both search engines and social networks.

If there’s a time to start incorporating these two instruments into your internet marketing strategy, it is now. Work with the top search engine marketing agency near you, formulate the right strategy and enjoy the immense benefit of doing SEO and social media marketing effectively.

Are your SEO tactics getting results?

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google-brain-data

Any organisation that relies upon online traffic for success and growth must also rely upon search results. Google rankings are dependent upon sites being optimised for selection by a complex algorithm. It’s an open secret that page one of Google search results is the hallowed ground for the serious marketer. Once there, it’s just a matter of converting traffic into revenue. A typical website is doing at least 2 things that is stopping them from achieving amazing organic SEO results. So, before we look at what you should be doing, let’s look at where you might be going wrong:

Low quality content-Content is an essential part of any organisation’s SEO campaign. Through the careful and subtle use of keywords and links you can attract hits. The problem comes when marketers stuff keywords into a blog post or landing page so that the subject of the copy is obscured. Not only is this obvious and off putting, it’s lazy. Internet users aren’t stupid, the novelty has worn off and most people are wise to these techniques. Being a transparent hit-monger with your content is tacky and off putting.

Broken links- I know it seems obvious, but broken links are a real problem. Broken links make an online merchant seem unprofessional and mean that all your amazing promotional copy is way less effective. Not only this, but Google hates broken links and your site will ominously slither down the rankings if you have too many.

Meta keywords tags- A long, long time ago(well ice ages ago in internet years), meta keyword tags were n acceptedmeans of climbing the rankings. Google gives this very little attention these days. If you are using meta keyword tags- you’re essentially wasting your time.

Poor site integrity-You might put a lot of time and effort into maintaining your ranking. If your site is not built in a way that Google’s search algorithm doesn’t like- you may be running up a cyber hill.

Not analysing-Analytic tools are a total no brainer. Why? One reason: measurability. Without knowing things like hits, page visits and clicks we can’t know whether are hard work is going to waste. It may be that one method needs tweaking or you are using the wrong keywords. Analytics give you real insights into the once intangible world of digital marketing.

I could go on but you get the point. What’s more the digital marketing landscape is perpetually evolving. Therefore, making use of SEO Experts gives you the best chance of getting a return on investment. Other simple things you can be doing include: posting regular content, attracting authority links and using Google analytics. Whatever the situation, SEO can be a complicated business and it may be that you feel you are doing everything right but are seeing disappointing outcomes. Unfortunately, this is a common complaint. In this situation, it becomes a false economy to avoid the services of SEO consultants that may be able demystify the chaos of ineffective SEO.

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