Internet Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web 2.0 Optimization
Posts tagged search engine optimization
Strategic Online Marketing
21 month ago
Online Marketing
There are various strategies to be used when organizing an online marketing campaign. While there are many different types of strategies that can be used, any one SEO campaign may use only a few of them. The SEO specialist needs to be able to choose which of the strategies available will be the best tactics for each client. It is not a simple task since there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all SEO marketing plan. Much research and hard work is necessary to determine which strategic tactics make up the most effective SEO campaign to meet a client’s online marketing needs.
Site Essentials
There are literally billions of web 2.0 websites that can be visited; however, many of them are not successful. While the needs and goals are different for each client, there are some elements that should be included on every site. Website optimization will include a series of items that are mostly unique to the client or business but remain basically the same across the board for each SEO campaign.
The first decision in website optimization is the URL. The domain name is like the business’ brand. It should be something that describes the basic premise of the business but is easy for users to remember. The site should be easy for visitors to navigate and find information pertinent to the business. If a visitor has to spend any length of time trying to find the information they are looking for they will likely move on to a more friendly site. The site design should also include contact information that is easy to find. It is good SEO practice to include contact information on every page on the site. Within the site, usually on the landing page, there should also be a very clear description of the businesses or services that are available. Potential customers should easily understand services as they are being offered to see if it meets their needs and be able to contact you about such services.
Every page on the site should contain content that is fresh and of high quality. It should not be just empty filler but should contain valuable information. There should also be a “call to action” that encourages the online visitor to call for a quote, sign up for an email list or add products to an online shopping cart.
From there it is always important to include SEO best practices for every web marketing campaign. Using SEO campaign strategies will ensure that traffic is driven to the site.
SEO Practices that Differ Depending on the Business
One of the differences between online business sites is the targeted audience. A lawyer site and a contract painter site will be trying to reach very different populations. Some internet users are looking purely for information but many are looking to employ various types of services. These considerations must come into play when developing an SEO and online marketing strategy.
The types of SEO strategies that are used will largely depend on what types of services are being made available. For instance, a legal site may largely deal with sharing information pertinent to their area of legal expertise while sites selling products will need to have some form of e-commerce available on site.
Local SEO will also play a large part in many business marketing strategies. It is important for contractors, doctors and lawyers to be able to reach an audience in their locality where they can easily provide services. An online marketer who will be shipping products or selling only through online sources will not be as concerned with local SEO.
The use of social media marketing on the web 2.0 platform will largely depend on the type of business as well. It is important to make use of this very effective platform. However, their usefulness will depend largely upon the marketing technique and the product being sold. Social bookmarking communities can be beneficial for most business areas; and social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook can be used to make potential or current clients aware of new products, services or information as it becomes available.
Does SEO Really Work?
15 months ago
How valuable is SEO really? Can I really optimize my site so that it ranks higher in search engine result pages? And does it really matter? Yes it does really matter; and SEO does really work to help sites achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages. This is the main purpose behind SEO strategies. They are not in opposition to web design, but rather are keys to successful to website optimization.
SEO
The Purpose of SEO
The fact that search engine optimization works is a given. SEO specialists have been using good SEO techniques for years and will continue to do so. The question is how it works. Website optimization means that an SEO specialist uses the right white hat techniques to get a site, or a page, to rank high in search engine result pages. The point is to get the search engines to give the site/page relevance or worth. This means using keywords and links properly to get search engines to find the site, crawl the site and rank the site in result pages. There are basically two aspects that SEO specialists will work with to optimize a site: on page and off page.
On page SEO
On page SEO is only half of site optimization. The site must be rich in keywords to first draw the web crawlers’ attention. Then after the search engine finds the site, it must have a site map to make information easy for the crawlers to see where all the relevant information is on the site. Each page should have proper keyword usage to help with its rank in the search engine results. On page optimization means having the keyword(s) strategically placed throughout content, titles and Meta tags. This is important because this is what makes the site visible to search engines.
Off page SEO
Off page SEO is also important. These are techniques that are employed off the site to help improve the site’s ranking in search results. They are not actually performed on the website or page. SEO that works will incorporate backlinks into its Off page optimization strategy. This is accomplished outside of the site itself. There are several ways to get backlinks to a site including using social media platforms, link exchanges or directory listings. They can also be purchased. The main reason getting backlinks is that search engines consider links when valuing a site. A site with relevant outside links is considered more valuable. Additionally, the higher quality of backlinks that your site has the more authority Google and other search engines will give to your site; for example if CNN.com links to your site or blog that link will be far more valuable than a link on some random site with less authority. The best strategy for getting quality backlinks is to create high quality fresh content and to promote that content within communities that may be interested.
Should I Hire an SEO Consultant?
For those who have any type of business website talking to a New Jersey SEO consultant is a must. To have your site rank consistently in the top three spots of search engine results will require their level of expertise.
SEO for Local Businesses
59 months ago
Image by Steven Vance via Flickr
For any local business, developing an online presence may be challenging, but it’s worth it. Web marketing is the new way to reach new customers. There are millions of websites and businesses on the Internet competing for business. From a local standpoint, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial.
SEO is a process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines, social networking sites and more. Through on page and off page SEO techniques, you can increase the amount of organic traffic to your website. Ranking in search engines for your local geographical areas is also important.
To appear in search results for different areas, specific targeting and local SEO needs to be implemented into your efforts; if you don’t intentionally target a county or specific town in your website copy or through other off-page SEO techniques, your business or website will not be found through search engines.
If your business ranks in your town and only your town, it’s most likely that you aren’t using any local SEO and neighboring towns won’t be able to find your business. You probably rank in your town because of minor mentions on your website. For example, Premiere Creative is located in Millburn, NJ and the address is written on the website in numerous places. If a customer was searching for, strategic marketing firm in Millburn NJ, the website would appear; the website would be far less likely to appear if someone were to search for SEO firm in NJ.
To appear for surrounding areas and counties, SEO must be implemented. Focusing on specific towns and counties requires on-page and off-page local SEO targeting. Google does build associations between towns and counties, but without any mentions or targeting for your business, they won’t make the connection.
It’s important for local businesses to use SEO. Although your local business website may appear in searches for towns that you conduct business in, it’s most likely due to the fact of an address mentioned on the website. Content is also important and keywords should be rich and business focused, strategically placed throughout webpages.
Learn About SEO
110 months ago
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization is a common practice throughout the internet. In a nutshell, SEO is the active process of getting organic traffic from search engines by optimizing your website. By improving internally and externally, SEO practices can vary. There are a number of ways to optimize a website and it’s important to actively use SEO for your website.
Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing drive majority of traffic to websites. If your website can’t be found using a search engine, it’s not likely you are receiving traffic (or potential customers). By using SEO and optimizing your site, search engines can find you and point users to your website. Search engines use a number of qualifications when crawling websites in response to a web search and it’s important to research things like keywords, products and competitors.
Search engines are always working to improve their results, which means you always need to be working to improve your rank. There are a number of ways to increase your rank and it’s a constant process. When search engines conduct a search they show results that are relevant and important. Relevance is simply having a page with the search keywords displayed and importance is perceived value or popularity of the site. It’s important to rank for both of these concepts by using relevant keywords in your content and value comes from things like backlinks, blogs or Page Rank.
Gaining popularity and acquiring an “importance” in your industry takes time. There are endless ways to help your rank in search engines. Link building is important to your website as Google, Bing and Yahoo use back links to evaluate your website’s credibility. For example, like discussed above, popularity (“importance”) is shown by the number of links leading to your website. Link building is part of SEO and there are a number of ways to increase your backlinks.
SEO Tip # 4 Benefits of an HTML Header
11 year ago
I would like to welcome you to my fourth SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the importance of adding an HTML header to your website.
Creating an HTML header for your website is extremely valuable and will help your site both from the user perspective and will help your site rank in search engines. A header is that bar on the top of a page that lists the main pages on the site (home, contact us, about us etc…) and is typically the first or second thing that a search engine sees when crawling a new site. Perhaps the most important thing about a good header is that it needs to be written in HTML, since this is the primary language of search engines. Another important thing is that the header should become a part of the sites template and should appear on every page of the site new and old. In addition to a good header you should also consider adding an HTML footer to your site; this is the same as a header but at the bottom of each page.
SEO Tip # 2 Using Facebook for SEO
61 year ago
Image via Wikipedia
I would like to welcome you to my second SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the use of Facebook for SEO.
Facebook is the world’s largest social networking community, with over 500 million registered users; Facebook might be seen as the world’s 6th largest country! Facebook is not designed for SEO (Facebook is designed to allow you to connect with people who you actually know, and if they catch you making too many friends or if they think you are “friending” too many people who you do not know they will suspend your account). Despite this, Facebook is the gorilla in the room and are simply too big to ignore, additional there are a few features that can be used for SEO. As far as your profile, the only things that Google will index are your name and your profile pic, backlinks that you mention on your wall… will not help you for SEO, although your friends may be interested In your links and may click on them… In order to get any SEO benefit from Facebook you need to create a business page, business pages are indexed by Google and some of the links mentioned there will help you improve your rankings.
Another useful feature of Facebook is the “like” button, this is a widget that you can put on any page that lets people “like” or vote for that page, although the # of likes that you have will not directly help your SEO, they may put your site or blog in front of the eyes of more people, b/c each time I like a page that page is posted on my wall, if you like this tip please make sure to like it!
If you wish to join the network of the authors of this blog you can, friend Moshe Zchut on Facebook; or friend Eugene Aronsky on Facebook.
Difference Between SEO and SEM
21 year ago
SEO and SEM
In recent years the sheer volume of “stuff” on the internet has exploded exponentially, and continues to grow at a fevered pace. Not only has the amount of content increased, but so has the diversity of content, following the development of web 2.0, and the widespread availability of broadband internet connections (which allow for users to load bigger files faster) many previously unforeseen ways of delivering content have come into existence, today “content” ranges from online videos, to websites, to blogs, Tweets etc… and the sheer volume of content that is added every second (or that has been added while you’ve been reading this post) is unimaginable.
Our content (website, blog, video, Squidoo page…) exists within this ever expanding universe of content and the ability of others (customers, clients…) to find this content will often make the difference between the success and the failure of your website, and often, the success or failure of your website will determine the success of your business, this is where SEO and SEM comes into the picture.
SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) are terms that are often used interchangeably within the online marketing community, although there are a few key differences and understanding these might help you in deciding which SEO consultancy to hire. SEO typically refers to things that are done on your site; this is more technical and consists of things such as proper tagging, and on page optimization of each page of your site, so that each page will be found in top search engines. For more advanced, or dynamic websites on page SEO can get very involved and tricky and if you want your dynamic website to achieve top results hiring a proper expert is essential.
SEM typically refers to things that are done off page to promote your site (although please note that SEO can also be used to talk about off page optimization and SEM can sometimes be used when talking about on page optimization). For many websites, particularly those in competitive industries a proper SEM campaign is essential in order to rank well in search engines. Such a campaign should consist of a number of different components and these should be adjusted and shifted depending on the industry and target audience. Here are some of the components that a SEM campaign might include: Link building (essential for all websites/blogs), social bookmarking (this is important for blogs, or for other types of sites that have regular new content), social networking (depending on your target audience and demographic there are many platforms for you to chose from, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Gather etc…) and there are many more things that your off page optimization campaign should have.
Do you have a good definition of SEM? Please share.
What do you use for off page optimization?
Is SEO Always the Same?
91 year ago
Industry specific SEO
Often most people see all SEO as being the same, and many SEO companies treat the optimization of different types of sites equally… but the reality is that SEO is not always the same, and different websites in different industries require different types of optimization. The simplest way to illustrate this concept is to think of traditional forms of marketing (lets say TV commercials for example). Different companies choose to optimize their budget on commercials by carefully choosing the shows during which their commercials air, (an add targeting kids products may appear either during a children’s show, or a show watched by parents, while an ad for the latest sports car might appear during certain sporting events that fit the demographic for that car…) such selection helps to ensure that each ad will reach the target niche for the product, and also helps to maximize each ad dollar the company spends. A similar process takes place, or rather should take place in every SEO campaign.
SEO as a whole encompasses as a huge spectrum of individual marketing techniques, and every campaign needs to select the best tools that would provide the biggest bang. SEO tools range from, on page optimization (which is typically the same, at least for most static websites), to off page optimization such as, social bookmarking, social media, blogging, link building… and furthermore each of these off page tools can be farther broken down, for example, under social media, there are many options that might work depending on your niche: Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Gather… In addition to these tools, there are certain industry specific SEO tools that can be used, such tools are things like, an online community that exists for real estate agents to network…
So the simple answer is, No, SEO is not always the same. Each website has to be analyzed, and each target niche has to be closely examined in order to see which tools will work best.
What can seo do for you?
01 year ago
I know that I have said this before… but a website without SEO is “…like winking at a girl from across the room when the lights are off…” If you have already taken the time, the effort and money to start a website, a blog… and assuming that you want your site, blog… to be seen by other people, and to be listed in search engines… then you need SEO. I will admit that professional SEO services can get pricy, and not everyone can afford a top SEO firm, but you do need to get your website optimized! For those of you out there who are planning to go about Search engine optimization the DIY route, I applaud you! But I warn you, getting your site ranked in search engines can be an uphill battle for a novice, and you need to devote the proper amount of time to this task. (More often than not people who try to do their own SEO get discouraged and give up, but if you are up to the task this blog should provide you with most of the basic tools you’ll need to get started).
In terms of specific results that a well optimized site can deliver, I cannot give you any concrete answer, but I can tell you that since getting their websites optimized with us many of our clients have gone on to get their biggest contracts ever! Since becoming our client, Dirty Blinds, a commercial window cleaning company in NJhas gone on to receive their biggest contract, being contracted to clean the windows in an entire school district! I can give you dozens of examples of how SEO has helped to improve this or that business, and how, even through this recession, companies with good websites have continued to see healthy growth… most of our other clients constantly tell us that they have been able to get consistent growth in their businesses and that much of their new business is originates through their websites, but the point is that, if you want to see consistent healthy growth in your company, SEO is a way to achieve this.
Have you recently discovered SEO? Please share with us and tell us what proper website optimization has done to your traffic…
The biggest secret of SEO: time
11There are many SEO tricks of the trade that SEO experts use, but the simple fact is that the most important aspect of any SEO (organic) campaign is time. You can do everything write from an SEO perspective, set up quality on page SEO, start building links… but it takes time for real SEO to show results. As a rule SEO companies typically require new customers to sign a 6 month contract, this is typically enough time to start seeing good results, but I would urge you that if you want to see amazing SEO results and if you want to make your website a leader in your chosen industry, you should think about SEO in years, rather than in months.
A big reason why time plays such an important factor in SEO is b/c Google looks at a websites age, how long the domain has been registered/how long the site has been up… as an indication on whether the site is an authority in its field (keywords), and more weight is given to your keywords the older you are.
Another reason that the age of your site plays such a big role is b/c page rank still plays a role in the ranking of your keywords and page rank tends to go up with the age of your site. (it is very difficult to get a high page rank when your site is young b/c it takes time for Google to assign your initial page rank, which is very low and then it takes time for you to get quality sites to link to you so that your page rank will increase).
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