Category Archives: SEO

Gearing up for 2012: Own Your Marketing Strategy

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Small business owners often overlook their own marketing strategy, planning and implementation because they are overwhelmed with the process, don’t know where to begin, and think it’s going to incur a high cost, so they push it to the way side and wing their business development and marketing, only to see that there are no new business or increased revenue.  Business owners should take their marketing serious if they want to grow their business, become known as an expert in their field, and attract new clients, and it will take an investment of time and money in order to learn how to leverage social media and online marketing tactics to attract and retain new clients, share your expertise across multiple channels, and get the search engines to index your website.

Don’t worry if you feel intimidated by all the verbiage around social media marketing, and SEO, but you and your business need to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

Here are a few things you need to assess immediately:

  • Website
    • branding
      • Is it time for an overhaul? when was the last time you updated your website? Consider new fonts, color, header and logo
      • What is your value proposition, is it time to reframe your positioning, strengths?
      • Is the language targeting your ideal customers? does it resonate with them, draw them in, and help them know,like, and trust you?
    • message
      • Does your website address your ideal customer’s pain points?
      • Does every page (tab) offer insightful tips, resources, (to enable the “know like and trust” factor)
      • are people (visitors) clear about who you are, what you offer and how you can help them?
    • Call to action (what do you want your visitor to do once they are on your site: sign up for newsletter? Download a giveaway that gives them a taste of who you are and your expertise? Sign up for a free 30 minute consultation?
    • List building tactics: (using text or newsletter to stay in touch with visitors) Your visitors are your potential clients. You want to continue to “touch” them on a regular basis by offering timely, relevant information they can use immediately. The more often they “see” you, the more chances they are getting to know you, and will eventually do business with you. There are tactics to employ if you are using a newsletter to educate, inform and add value to your prospects – that will drive them back to your website and social sites.  That is why having a strong website, a newsletter or text messaging system, and social media all offer ways to connect and foster relationships with people who end up becoming a raving fan,endorser, a referral partner, and client!
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – this is where it can get tricky.  You don’t really want to do this yourself unless you have been aptly trained and understand how you can optimize your website on the back end (for the search engines) as well as applying tactics on the front end (website content, blogging, newsletter, utilizing videos and social media)
    • Keyword searches help you know what people are looking for online, this can give you ideas on what content to write about, adding appropriate headlines and keywords within your blog post
    • Keyword searches also tell you what words are highly searched for, and depending on saturation, what words are better to use and what words won’t work so well.

These are some of the things you should do first if you want to grow your business, attract ideal customers and be seen as an expert in your field.  Sometimes having a fresh pair of eyes to look over your website, offer recommendations, will save you a ton of time, even money, because there are alternatives and viable options that can get you up to speed fairly quickly and taking your game up a notch.

You don’t have to wait to get your self all together to attract your ideal customers and build up your business; having a smart social media strategy and making it easy for people to connect with you such as “seeing and hearing you” via tweets, Facebook posts, blog commenting and engaging within LinkedIn groups and Quora will definitely show your value and expertise to others (even if your website isn’t perfect) but you want to make a way to capture your visitors, stay connected to them via text messaging or newsletters, and cross-pollinating all your online activities so your website gets indexed by the search engines, so people can share your information within their network via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, there by growing your network, creating a buzz around you and your business, and growing your list.  It all counts and it will all pay off, just start with getting your website up and running with the right tools in place, then get a strategy in place, know what platforms to be on, tools to use to manage and measure, and have fun!

2012 is going to be a great year, commit to that thought and make it happen.

Hire a business marketing consultant who can help you plan your steps and keep you on track so that 2012 will be prosperous for you.

Social Media Efficiency: 2 Posting Tools to Aggregrate and Distribute Your Digital Content

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I was reading “8 Social Media Platforms (Other Than the Big 3) to Drive Traffic To Your Site” by Jen Jenkins over at the Social Media Today Site. She shared some of my favorite sites, so I thought to compliment her blog post with a tool that will efficiently share your content with a click of a button, and give your content mileage online. So let’s say you have content ready to publish on your site, but you simply don’t have the time to publish to multiple sites. How can you get more mileage out of your blog, your video, podcat and webcast?

I’m one to cast a wide net online and giving content as much mileage as possible so I’ve found a way to do it efficiently. Seamless comes to mind when I think of a tool called OnlyWire. I love this tool because you can update OnlyWire via a WordPress plug-in, so whenever I blog, as long as I click on the little box “Publish to OnlyWire”, my content will then get submitted to the 23+ sites I’ve added to OnlyWire. What happens next is that your content is now distributed across multiple channels comprised of news sites, networking and bookmarking sites (all with a click of a button).

Not only can you bookmark your content thru OnlyWire via the WordPress Plug-in, you can also manually add your past content (including YouTube, Press Releases, Articles) directly from the OnlyWire site. As long as content is relevant, you can re-purpose older material (video,photo,podcast,webcast,blog, article, news release) with OnlyWire. Key thing: Relevant, Valuable, Educational Content can be re-shared thru OnlyWire – there are people waiting to read your content so go for it!!

There are over 30 sites available on OnlyWire comprised of news sites, social networking sites, and bookmark sites that will submit your content, with a click of a button. The most time you will spend will be in the “set up”, Technically, you’d need to create optimized profiles on selected sites, then add the user id and passcodes to OnlyWire. You can also add the WordPress plug-in and as you add content, just remember to select the OnlyWire box so your content will be submitted to those sites.

After you create an account, you have the option of manually adding your past content (don’t waste it): Headline, URL, tags and a short description. OnlyWire has a free subscription plan and a paid subscription plan so check to see which plan best fits your goals. I use the paid plan, but my clients are using the free version and are receiving good results. The key thing here is to share great content, so cast a wide net by bookmarking it, with the intent to drive traffic back to your website, and convert those visitors.

Casting a wide net online, bookmarking content to many sites with a click of a button will get your name and message out into cyberspace and create an online presence in places outside of Twitter and Facebook and drive traffic to your website.

Another Key thing: create compelling headlines and lace the content with keywords that speak to your target audience.

Practice these traits when it comes to monitoring and measuring results: Persistent, Consistent and Patient (PCP). It takes time to attract and retain a “fan base”, so add value to your community, and stick to the implemention plan using tools like OnlyWire. In a matter of time you will see an increase of twitter followers, facebook fans, and increase web traffic. PCP is the key here!

The 2nd favorite tool I use consistently and that will save you time is Posterous.

Posterous Posterous Spaces is the easiest way to share safely online. Publish to multiple Spaces on the web, by email, or by using our iPhone or Android apps.

But there is more to Posterous. You can use Posterous as a website that compliments your website (customize the site with your branding or select one of their themes; add pages (tabs) or link back to your website so as you use Posterous to upload photos, videos, headline/URL – Posterous will auto post to to the sites listed below, AND upload your videos to blip.tv, viddler, vimeo, and Youtube (which saves you the time of logging into multiple sites to upload a video). Posterous can be used as a catch all collection of your social media posts – use it as a platform where people can skim your content, click on your pages or links and subscribe to your Posterous. You can use the site to communicate with your community or simply use it as an autoposting tool.

Posterous enables you to add Google Analytics and add an RSS feed. You can also see the number of views per posts, but also check your google analytics for details.

Posterous

These two tools have helped me manage my time effectively. As I read content and write content, I use Posterous to share fresh content daily, upload videos and photos knowing that it’s getting shared and submitted to my online accounts. I know as I blog, OnlyWire will autosubmit my content to bookmarking, news and social networking sites. This frees me up to visit Twitter, Facebook page, Linkedin and Linkedin groups, as well as Friendfeed and other sites to engage and add value to my community.

I’d love to hear about your favorite social media tool. If you like to guest blog here, send me a note here or at http://www.Facebook.com/CyberqueenVA

Does Your Web Site Pass the Title Tag Test?

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SE-TacticsYou know those words in the top bar of the browser when you’re on a website? You may not have noticed them before now, but you’ll want to pay attention to what shows there for your site from now on.

Those words are from the page’s title meta tag, a part of the code that makes up the page. And while the title tag is just one small part of the code, it plays a really big role.

Title tags are crucial in getting your site indexed and ranked in the search engines. A title tag tells the search engine what your page is about – and it’s also what displays in search results to represent your site.

Let’s take a look at your title tags now. Pull up your site and look at what appears in the very top bar of the browser.

If you’re seeing generic terms like “Untitled Document”, “Welcome to our Home Page”, “About Us” or “Contact Us” as you click through the pages, it’s time for an overhaul. (Known as stop words or dead weight words, these are so common that search engines ignore them or return search results irrelevant to what the person is looking for.)

If you see just the name of your company or services, your title tags will also need help.

Here’s what you need to do to get those all-important title tags working for you…

  • Include your most important keywords in your title tags. These are the terms people will most likely use to conduct a search on Google, Yahoo, etc. (A solid list of keywords is the foundation for any search engine optimization effort.)
  • Avoid your company’s name or product/service names as the sole component of title tags. It’s likely that only a very small segment of potential searchers will be searching on branded names, so be sure to use more descriptive terms the average customer might use.
  • Each page should have a separate title tag that represents the unique content on that page. Don’t be tempted to use the same title tag for all the pages in one section of your site, for example.
  • Keep title tags to around 60 characters. Anything longer and it may be chopped off by the search engines.
  • Don’t stuff keywords. This makes your title tag appear messy or unreadable, and it’s going to entice fewer clicks even if it ranks high in search engines. Stop words such as “the”, “of”, “that”, “is”, “and”, “to” and so forth can be used sparingly to improve the readability of a title.
  • Find out which other websites are using your keywords in their title tags to get an idea of who you’ll be competing with. Google has a handy tool to help you find out. Go to Google.com and type in the search bar “intitle:your keywords” (quotes not needed).

Sample Title Tags

We’ll show you a couple of examples to give you a boost on your way to great title tags.

If you look at T-mobile.com, you’ll see a title tag something like:

“Cell phones, cellular phone plans, prepaid cell phones, free cell phones and deals”

Not bad. You can tell someone has put thought into which keywords the home page should rank for.

On the other hand, go to Nortel.com, and you’ll see a good example of what not to do:

“Nortel”

Here’s another example from the alpaca niche:

Before: “Alpaca Meadows Homepage”

After: “Wisconsin Alpaca Farm, Northern Wisconsin Alpaca Breeder: Alpaca Meadows”

The first tag is quite generic and will not rank well since most people looking for information on alpacas will not be looking for a specific ranch or breeders name right off the bat.

The second tag on the other hand contains many general AND specific keyword phrases such as “alpaca”, “alpaca farm”, “alpaca breeder” along with keywords related to its location. Not only will this descriptive tag gain more traction in the rankings but it will lure more visitors to the site.

Creating great title tags is a little bit of an art form. Indeed, some SEO engineers specialize in this, though hard-hitting meta titles should be included with any on-page SEO efforts you undertake.

Stone Reuning is president of SEO Advantage, a search engine optimization company that helps businesses harness the revenue generation potential of their websites. Referenced in books such as “Writing Web-Based Advertising Copy to Get the Sale” and the BusinessWeek bestseller “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”, http://www.seo-advantage.com/ offers information to help small businesses compete online.
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

BlogTalkRadio: Online Marketing & Social Media Tales

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"Webify Your Business"

This week’s guest on my Savvy Business Leaders Blog Talk Radio show is Patrick Schwerdtfeger, author of “Make Yourself Useful, Marketing in the 21st Century” and “Webify Your Business, Internet Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed” , founder of Tactical Execution, an internet marketing company that leverages cutting – edge strategies to build credibility and exposure for its clients.

Patrick is also an inspirational speaker who has given keynotes and workshops in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Join in on the conversation this Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 10:00am PDT / 12:00noon Central / 1:00pm Eastern. To listen 347-843-4092

You can also listen from your computer via live stream !

Patrick will share his methodology around online and social media marketing, touching on building an effective website, participating in the conversation, calibrate your online identity and ways to WOW your internet audience.

We encourage participation from you, the callers and can’t wait to “see” you there!

Don’t forget, it’s tomorrow, Oct. 21 at 10am pdt : 347-843-4092

You an also listen via  live stream from your computer!

What is SEO?

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series SEO

If you’re new to online marketing or currently have a website, but feel discouraged about the lack of performance (no traffic, no new  business,  have no clue what SEO means etc.), you are not alone.

Several years ago, I created my website through Officelive.  I  knew that this would be a way for prospects to learn more about me and I “thought” that because I had an online website that I would attract prospects to me, but this was not the case.  I recall the time, after speaking with an agent about how to drive traffic to my website, and how overwhelmed I felt by the whole process.  He mentioned SEO, organic listings vs. PPC. Keywords, Meta tags, etc. etc.  I was that person with the “deer in headlight look”.

If anything, the only thing I DID get was to enter my company name and URL into local and national directories, under appropriate categories, with a description of my services. (Although what I know now is, I need to use optimized keywords in order to attract my prospects).

Years later, I know a thing or two about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and Link Building, but after spending time with Thomas Petty, Founder and President of The Bay Area Search Engine Academy, I realized that I could benefit from learning alittle more about SEO and the package it comes in. What I like about his courses, is that I have an option to register for  a 2 or 3 or 5 day course.  I’ve decided as a social media consultant that learning the in’s and out’s of SEO and SEM and everything related to that topic would be a compliment to my social media services.  I get the basics of it, but I admit, I really want to know what my options are, and be able to offer those same options to my clients. 

Would you want to know the cost effective ways to enhance your online presence – get your website ranked on Google, get quality backlinks, and conduct effective key word searches?

Would you want to :

  • Understand how Search engines rank web pages to optimize your site and out-rank your competitors?
  • Learn new and innovative methods of link building so your brand stays in front of your customers?
  • Drive online traffic by using organic (free) listings  and prevent search engines from identifying you as ”spam”  and avoid “spam” penalties?
  • Optimize pay-per-click campaigns (PPC) and maximize your rankings?
  • Monitor performance to increase Return on Investment (ROI) using free and paid analytics software ?

    • Thomas Petty, Bay Area Search Engine Academy website lists a world of resources at your finger tips.

    You can also follow him at http://www.Twitter.com/BayAreaSea

    http://www.facebook.com/BayAreaSearchEngineAcademy

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