Yearly Archives: 2018

Search Engine Optimization, Social Websites Marketing

TwoThings You Need For Every Website: SEO and Social Media Connections

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social bookmarkingIf you have a business website, SEO (search engine optimization) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are the two must-have elements that will turn a chunk of digital real estate into a profit-making engine. It’s pretty simple why: they drive traffic, and traffic is the beating heart of commerce.

SEO
SEO drives traffic through search engines. Without specific effort in SEO, your website might accidentally end up ranking well for a keyword or two relevant to your business. With SEO, you can handpick exactly the keywords that will be the most valuable to your business and work your way to the top of the rankings for those keywords.

The difference between first and second place for a keyword is the difference between collecting 50% of the traffic for that keyword and 20% of the traffic for that keyword. That’s why SEO is the most important thing your website can ever have — every rank upward you manage to climb, the more visitors you earn. First page placement only means that you’ve broken out of the foothills — you haven’t scaled the peak until you’ve hit first place!

Social Media
Social media work drives traffic through the other largest sites in the world. Create a profile for your business on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and you’re inviting the world to come and comment on your existence. The result is instant and permanent judgment — if your company produces something amazing, your profiles will gather followers, comments, and more. If it doesn’t, you’ll get nothing.

In that way, social media produces some of the most authentically organic traffic in the world — traffic that is the most likely to convert into money when it visits your site. It takes time and energy in large amounts and, as mentioned, can be a real waste if your product doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but when it works, it’s pure gold.

That’s why, if you have a business that has a website, you need SEO and you need social media connections. Without them, the greatest website in the world could be languishing in some forgotten corner of the Internet, never to receive enough traffic to catch on.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

Small Business SEO is The Midgame, But You Also Need A Good Start

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small businessWhen you are just starting to get a grip on the ins and outs of your small business, SEO isn’t the first thing on your mind. A lot of gurus and Internet geniuses will tell you that it should be, but that’s simply not the truth. The truth is that, whether your business is offline or online, you have to have a solid setup before SEO will do you any good at all. That solid setup comes in three steps.

Step 1: A Solid Product or Service
If you aren’t selling something that people need — or at least believe they need — you won’t make it, period. Finding a niche that isn’t already overrun with fierce competition can be quite difficult, but even if you manage to come across a forum full of thousands of senior citizens with a strange interest in interracial dating and you have an amazing idea for helping them hook up, that’s no guarantee that RetiredSwirlCones.Com is going to do good business. You need to do whatever you’re doing well so that the people who do risk buying from you approve of what they buy.

Step 2: Conversion, Conversion, Conversion
The next thing you need is a way to convince people to take that risk. Online, that means a killer sales letter or some other form of convincing communication like a targeted Email marketing campaign or a sales video. Offline, it means that when someone walks into your store, they need to be impressed with the quality, professionalism, and quality of not only the product itself, but the environment around it. If you’re not converting at least 3% of online visitors and 20% of walk-ins, you need to work on that before you start driving traffic.

THEN, SEO Kicks In
Finally, the time arrives to kick your business into high gear. With the groundwork laid, you can purchase the services of an SEO company knowing that the traffic they add will convert into enough sales to more than make up for the expense.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

First Page Placement Is As Easy as Profiting From Collected Underwear

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boy first place

First page placement on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is suprisingly easy to obtain. All you have to do is be willing to pay for it: a bit of clever pay-per-click advertising will do it quickly, or a significant organic SEO campaign will get it done in the long-term. It’s like the man says: you can get it quick, well-done, or cheap — or even any two of those — but never all three at a time. PPC is the quick and well-done version of first page placement; organic SEO is the cheap and well-done version. You don’t want the quick and cheap version, because it doesn’t actually last long enough to mean anything to your quarterly bottom line.

Now, most certainly there are those of you out there who want to know what the heck underwear has to do with anything. Others of you are reading this specifically because you recognized the reference to South Park’s underwear gnomes, a race of little people who have a definitive business plan:

  • Step One: Collect Underwear
  • Step Two: ???
  • Step Three: Profit!

The sad truth is that for many webmasters out there, their business plan closely mimics that of the underwear gnomes:

  • Step one: Achieve First Page Placement
  • Step Two: ???
  • Step Three: Profit!

The missing link, of course, is conversions. Converting is the art of getting someone who has seen your website to actually spend money on it. Getting first page placement is a critical part of the process — it’s Step One, after all — but it’s only Step One. You also have to be able to get the visitors that your placement in the SERPs provides you to actually part with their money.

In fact, in most modern web based businesses, the actual SEO and/or PPC management — the responsibility for getting onto the first page in the first place — is outsourced to a skilled SEO company specifically so that the webmaster can focus on conversions. It’s a classic strategy because it works. So focus your education and your time on converting your guests, and let an SEO company take care of Step One for you — you’ll be grateful you did.

Internet Marketing

Long Tail Keywords are the catalyst to Local Internet Marketing Success

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keywords-lettersWhat is a long tail keyword? The term “organic SEO” is considered a short tail keyword. If you expand it to “Los Angeles organic SEO link building services” you have a long tail keyword. The objective when using long tails is to more accurately predict what searchers are going to be looking for. The short tail keyword covers a broad spectrum of options, so the field the searcher will be selecting from is much larger and will include firms from around the world. The specificity of the long tail narrows that search down to strictly local companies that offer the exact service you’re looking for.

Long tail keywords are the catalyst to local internet marketing success. If you optimize your content with strictly short-tail keywords, you’ll be buried deep inside search results on pages no one ever looks at. How many times have you gone past Page One when you’re searching for something? If your website isn’t on the first page, your chances of scoring some business off of search are non-existent. You might get a hit or two off Page Two, but if you’re using broad keywords you won’t even show up that high.

Here at First Page Placement, our objective when doing local internet marketing is to drive local traffic to your website. We do that by submitting you to local directories and map sites like Google Places, but we also optimize your content with local long tail keywords. When someone in your area does a search for a specific service, the companies that are listed as local and use local keywords in their content are the ones that come up first. How do we know it works? We’ve used the strategy on our own company website and we are comfortably present on Page One for all Los Angeles SEO keywords. Isn’t that where you found us?

Google changed the rules last year when they adopted the Google Panda change in their search algorithm, but one thing remained constant. Content is the number one variable in the equation. They rate it higher than link count and ahead of your gross traffic number. Content is the element they consider first when assigning the quality score that determines your rank and page position. If you’re using the same keywords everyone else in your industry uses, you’ll rank low. Be different with long tail keywords and you’ll rank high. It’s as simple as that.

 

 

Internet Marketing

Brick, Mortar, and Digital Ephemera: How Local Internet Marketing Drives Profits

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profitLocal internet marketing is one of those tools that has two areas of thought about it — there’s the people who use it, and the people who don’t understand it. There might also be people who know about it but don’t own a business to locally internet market, but they don’t count.

If you’re a business owner, you probably already use local internet marketing, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it — and if you’re not, it’s because you don’t get it. If you did, you would.

The biggest source of confusion about local internet marketing comes from business owners who don’t understand how a website (or “a bit of digital ephemera” as one shopkeeper described it to me) can bring people in to see your wares at your brick-and-mortar store. It’s part of a common bit of techno-agnosticism that says that the Internet and the real world are two different places that don’t interact.

But the fact is, even if you don’t, most of the people in your area look up whatever they plan to do online before they actually do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new recipe or a store in their area that caters to lovers of martial arts equipment. People don’t want to waste their time on something that might not work out if they can verify online that it will work before they have to leave the house.

The result, if you haven’t clicked yet, is this: they get on their computer and they look up something like “ninja gear Waldron Arkansas”. If they happen to see your store’s website first on the list that comes up on their screen, there’s a very good chance that they’ll be on the way in the door within the hour.

Now you can’t win that particular scenario if you don’t have a website, but if you’re interested, you can generally find someone to build you a website pretty inexpensively. Then there’s only one more key ingredient to make it start sending you customers: a little bit of organic SEO.

Social Websites Marketing

You Don’t Have Time to Do Social Bookmarking — Much Less Facebook or Twitter

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facebook likeSocial connectivity is a wonderful part of the new Internet. The rise of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — the trifeca of modern business connection — has changed everything about the way the world markets. Getting testimonials isn’t a matter now of finding 6 or 7 individuals willing to go on video and talk about your product. It’s a matter of getting 60 or 70 thousand people to click that [Like] button.

Modern folk go online and they look up your business name, and they probably find your website first — but they also probably find it’s Facebook page second. If they click on it and find double-digit followers, they know instantly that you’re small time, offer a crappy product, or both. If they find some story about your business, they probably find it through a social bookmark on Reddit, Delicious, or a similar service.

Paying attention to social marketing isn’t an option any more — it’s the norm. The problem is that social marketing isn’t like normal organic SEO. Organic SEO can be — and is sometimes best — done in the middle of the night (or noon in Bangladesh.) Social networking is a matter of connecting to your base when they’re available, generally right in the middle of your work day. Do your social bookmarking late in the day, and by the time anyone who might care would vote it up, it’ll be off the first page and into the pit of oblivion.

That’s just the beginning, though. Social bookmarking takes time — because unless you build up a presence on a site like Reddit, no one will ever care about your new entries enough to vote them up. Like anything else ‘social’, bookmarking isn’t about dropping information and running — you have to create a persona, build relationships, and develop your presence in order to get enough respect to maximize the medium.

Facebook and Twitter are actually easier to get a following on, but take more constant effort. In the end, they don’t take any less time than bookmarking — and if you intend to put out any kind of quality content on a regular basis, might even take more.

Email Marketing, Web Content

What Do You Do When Website SEO Just Isn’t Enough?

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There are thousands of webmasters across the country who have been in this position before: you know you’ve got a solid product, and you’ve been paying for professional website SEO services for months. You’re getting some pretty solid rankings going.

You’ve done everything right — you’ve got a diverse array of links coming from several different IP address, created at different times of day — and you’ve got the traffic to back it up. Google Analytics tells you that you get more than 100 hits from organic searches every single day, and the bounce rate is low, so you know they’re not just leaving because they didn’t expect to end up at a sales page.

What do you do? It’s obvious that your SEO efforts are working — and every client who actually purchased your product (or service) has had excellent things to say about it. You haven’t had a single refund request, and you’ve got testimonials up the wahzoo. The only problem is that your website just doesn’t turn visitors into customers the way it should.

Well, there are several options, but let’s take a look at the best:

1) Get Better Copy
Surfers who don’t like what they see will bounce, and Analytics will tell you that they’ve bounced. If you have visitors that stick around for 30 seconds to a few minutes and they still don’t buy from you, the problem is with your copy. You might want to consider finding a professional copyrighter and asking them to rework your page. You’ll want your SEO company to work together with him and make sure your keywords still place properly, as well.

2) Change Your Goal
Sometimes, a product just isn’t a “must buy” — and there’s not a lot you’re going to do to convince visitors to hand over their money. Some gurus will tell you that you have to start over and find a new product; only “must buy”s are viable online. Others will tell you that those gurus are dumb.

What you do need to do is switch away from trying to get them to buy right away, and move to a strategy of simply reminding them that you exist every once in a while and telling them why they should consider buying from you. Targeted email marketing is probably your best bet at that point. Talk to your SEO company today.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

SEO in a Jersey: The Full Court Press Release Service

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newsMuch like your fantasy football team winning their season, there is a strong element of luck involved in writing a dispatch to a press release service. Certainly, every press release will get listed on a few websites, and those press releases will provide simple backlinks for a short time until they get outdated and removed from the archives. But that’s not really the purpose of a press release — it’s just the door prize, as it were. The real goal is viral exposure. That’s why, when you write for a press release service, you have to write well.

Headliners Don’t Have to Be Haters
There was a fascinating article that came out of a journalists’ conference recently, talking about the value of a funny headline. It claims that website SEO is killing clever headlining, because puns don’t translate well into search engine terms. To be blunt, that’s a pile of hooey. SEO keywords don’t mean no creativity — you just have to retain the coherence of the keyword while you build the clever part around it. This article could be called “SHIFT KEY NEEDS PRESS-RELEASE SERVICE” or “Jailed Journalists Seek Press Release Service.” It would have to be written to tie it all together, of course, but that’s what they pay writers like me for, after all.

The Strength of A Strong Hook Shot
There’s nothing more disappointing than watching your favorite team bust into the court, pumped up and ready to go, and then watch then get crushed so badly in the first few minutes that their morale breaks. There’s also nothing quite as sad as following a brilliant headline into a press release and finding it…lacking. So every press release needs to have a powerful hook — something to drive a journalist that’s casually glancing over the press release to want to post it on his website or print it in his publication.

An Easy Lay-Up
Finally, a press release without a call to action is like a clean fast-break with no lay-up at the basket. No matter how killer your headline and how strong you hook, if you can’t sink the last ball at the buzzer, you won’t win the game, end of story. Write with the end in mind, toss it up, and make it stick.

Blogs

Custom Blog Creation Does Nothing Without Regular Blog Posting

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fresh blog postingNo matter how much you pay for it, getting a high-end SEO company to do some custom blog creation for you is a complete waste of time unless you have someone — on-staff or freelance — to engage in regular blog posting as well. A blog is not a one-time expense — no matter what some crazy gurus want to tell you about autoposters, content shufflers, or other blackhat garbage.

The truth about blogs is that search engines love them. New content is like catnip to a search engine: it drives them crazy. They’ll give any new content a fair shake at the front page for a short period of time. But that’s not really the key to blogging success unless you prefer your success one twenty-minute burst at a time. If you really want to take advantage of that kitty-dro, you need to keep posting fresh content on a regular basis.

Every time that you post fresh content to your blog, assuming that content is relevant to the rest of the posts you’ve made on your blog, the search engines add a little bit more authority to your site regarding the keywords that are in your posts. Of course, at the same time, you don’t want to post exclusively on the same couple of keywords, because eventually they’ll assume you’re keyword stuffing and ignore you. Also, don’t schedule your posts to be released at the same time every X days — the search engines hate repetitive timestamps.

Now, this is not to be said that posting regularly is the sum total of great bloggery, either. You do still need a qualified expert to set up your blog in accordance to a myriad of SEO rules that are hardly obvious to the casual businessperson. You’re still best off a URL that reflects one of your choicest keywords — and if you can buy one that’s been in existence for a few uninterrupted years, it’ll help a lot. Both custom blog creation and regular blog posting are necessary to make a good blog truly great.

Directory Submissions

Directory Submission and Social Bookmarking: Cheap And Easy SEO

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social bookmarkingThere are a lot of ways to get your SEO on, and they range from the expensive and complex (custom blog creation, web 2.0 property linkrings) to the cheap and easy (directory submission, social bookmarking). Today, we’re going to take a look at that second category: cheap and easy SEO that anyone can wrap their minds around.

Directory Submission
The Internet is full of directories of all kinds. There are website directories, article directories, graphical directories, and many more. If you have the material to submit to a directory (and you can pass whatever rules it’s set to prevent just anyone from slapping stuff up on it’s portal), you’ve got an instant backlink just waiting to be taken advantage of.

Of course, it helps if the material is actually relevant to your website, and it helps even more if the directory uses dofollow links, but still, that’s not all that hard to accomplish. Granted, one single backlink from one single directory isn’t going to amount to much unless it’s one of the biggest directories of it’s type — and those big directories tend to have the strictest rules on what they’ll allow on their site. So you need either the expertise to navigate those rules or a massive list of lesser directories and a few hours to sit around and submit to all of them.

Social Bookmarking
social bookmarking signSocial bookmarking is what you do on all those popular sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and their ilk. It’s a quick and easy process in which you open an account and then turn in some bookmarks to your various web pages. Voila! Instant backlink, and just maybe someone will come across your bookmark and follow it on it’s own merit.

It’s not quite that easy, though, because not all social bookmarking sites use dofollow links, so you have to know which ones are worth submitting to. Also, if you drop even a small hint on your social profile on those bookmarking sites, the search engines will be able to tell that you opened the account and they’ll discount the value of those links down to nearly zero. There’s also the issue that social bookmarking sites take an ongoing investment if you intend to get any long-term traffic from them.

In the end, even the cheap and easy SEO is best done by the experts, it seems.