by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
Your website can quickly suffer SEO irrelevance, particularly if you rely on more edgy content development strategies. The best tool available to ensure site relevance is provided by Google in its Webmaster Tools product. With it you can see what Google considers the most common keywords on your site. This information can be used to optimize content and ensure it is focused around a central theme. The tool will also reveal if the content is actually relevant, it Google's eyes, to your website and its objective. Another option to achieve the same result is to develop a tag cloud to determine the relevance to the keyword target of the page.
One of the major mistakes to those who are not familiar or trained in SEO (search engine optimization) is the failure to realize that it is a process that requires building upon incremental improvements over time to move up in the rankings. The Google Webmaster Tools provides insights into the number of impressions you are receiving (pages displayed) vs. the number of clicks (people clicked on links on the page or navigation links). This might tell you that it's time to improve the quality of titles and descriptions.
Setting up regular monthly reviews of crawl errors, relevancy assessments and ranking reports will help you increase the ranking of your site. Some of these things can be done on your own, but some can require a professional SEO firm.
Your website can quickly suffer SEO irrelevance, particularly if you rely on more edgy content development strategies. The best tool available to ensure site relevance is provided by Google in its Webmaster Tools product. With it you can see what Google considers the most common keywords on your site. This information can be used to optimize content and ensure it is focused around a central theme. The tool will also reveal if the content is actually relevant, it Google's eyes, to your website and its objective. Another option to achieve the same result is to develop a tag cloud to determine the relevance to the keyword target of the page.
One of the major mistakes to those who are not familiar or trained in SEO (search engine optimization) is the failure to realize that it is a process that requires building upon incremental improvements over time to move up in the rankings. The Google Webmaster Tools provides insights into the number of impressions you are receiving (pages displayed) vs. the number of clicks (people clicked on links on the page or navigation links). This might tell you that it's time to improve the quality of titles and descriptions.
Setting up regular monthly reviews of crawl errors, relevancy assessments and ranking reports will help you increase the ranking of your site. Some of these things can be done on your own, but some can require a professional SEO firm.
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
As we said last week, LinkedIn is not talked about as much when it comes to Internet Marketing, but it is a powerful tool you should not over look. This week we will look at how to engage with others on LinkedIn.
So you want a prospect to do business with you. What do you do? Well, you need to prove that you are worthy. The best way to do this is to get prospects engaged and show them that you are a leader in your industry. So how do you engage with them?
As we said last week, LinkedIn is not talked about as much when it comes to Internet Marketing, but it is a powerful tool you should not over look. This week we will look at how to engage with others on LinkedIn.
So you want a prospect to do business with you. What do you do? Well, you need to prove that you are worthy. The best way to do this is to get prospects engaged and show them that you are a leader in your industry. So how do you engage with them?
- Update your status daily, but not that you are eating tacos or going to play golf. Put informative content that can help your prospects. Show them solutions for their problems.
- Regularly provide tips, tools, resources, video and articles and distribute them through your LinkedIn network, including the groups you belong to.
- Start debates within LinkedIn groups. For example, a client posted "Is Article Marketing just an SEO link-building tool?" By starting discussions like this, he has gained proof form those who support his ideas. For those who do not, it has provided a great discussion panel where he can show off his expertise and even display case studies.
- Answer questions on the Q&A board and within different groups. This will demonstrate your experience and help you become an established expert.
- If you do seminars, webinars, teleseminars in your industry, make sure to add them to LinkedIn events, if they are open to the public. This will again establish you as an expert in your field. You can also post sneak preview articles of what you will be speaking on, encouraging people that want the "rest of the story", to register for the event.
- Make sure your profile is complete. Do polls, insert your blog feed, post presentations, etc. Using the new publications application you can post e-books, articles and other publications.
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
Like a songwriter, whose goal is to get their point across in as few words as possible, so is the goal of the blog writer. Whenever a blog post is complete, go back and remove as many words as possible without changing the meaning of the content. A very common mistake is the over-use of "you" and "your". It is sometimes unavoidable but too much can ruin even the best sentence. For example:
Example 1 - To ensure a good business blog, you want to make it easy to read so you can convey the appropriate
message to your target audience.
Example 2 - A good business blog is easy to read while still conveying the appropriate message to its target audience.
By removing a few unnecessary words and with a little restructuring, Example 2 is easier to read and shorter than Example 1.
Another thing to remember when writing a blog is to get to the point quickly. You should put the main points of the blog at the top of the post and work down. Business blog readers don't have much time, so they want the information quickly. Putting the main points first also helps with search engines because they index from the top down. You can also use introductions, but keep them short and include the main focus in the intro.
Like a songwriter, whose goal is to get their point across in as few words as possible, so is the goal of the blog writer. Whenever a blog post is complete, go back and remove as many words as possible without changing the meaning of the content. A very common mistake is the over-use of "you" and "your". It is sometimes unavoidable but too much can ruin even the best sentence. For example:
Example 1 - To ensure a good business blog, you want to make it easy to read so you can convey the appropriate
message to your target audience.
Example 2 - A good business blog is easy to read while still conveying the appropriate message to its target audience.
By removing a few unnecessary words and with a little restructuring, Example 2 is easier to read and shorter than Example 1.
Another thing to remember when writing a blog is to get to the point quickly. You should put the main points of the blog at the top of the post and work down. Business blog readers don't have much time, so they want the information quickly. Putting the main points first also helps with search engines because they index from the top down. You can also use introductions, but keep them short and include the main focus in the intro.
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
It is essential to check the SEO status of your website by running a quick checkup. All size sites will benefit greatly from this overview to gain insight into how effective your pages and site are.
If everything is working perfectly, all of the pages on your website would be accessible to the search engines and crawled with frequency. Most websites have issues in the form of crawl errors which keep search engines from indexing pages on the site. Working to remove these errors will give the search engines an easier path to crawl your content and help with SEO efforts.
First you should identify the pages that are returning the errors and start correcting the problems. Find pages with broken links using the free W3C Link Checker that you can get from http://wsm.co/fZsIGv. Then either build pages that the broken links go to or implement at 301 redirect to send users to the correct destination. You will be surprised at the impact this can have on search engine rankings.
Another opportunity to remove barriers is to reduce the amount of duplicate content on the website. Those areas that are most prone to duplicate content are title tags, dynamic URL's, meta descriptions and product descriptions. A useful tool to aid in the fight against duplicate content is Xenu Link Sleuth. The tool provides information on broken links and for possible duplication issues. Another option is Yahoo Site Explorer.
Next week we will look at site relevance and current rankings.
It is essential to check the SEO status of your website by running a quick checkup. All size sites will benefit greatly from this overview to gain insight into how effective your pages and site are.
If everything is working perfectly, all of the pages on your website would be accessible to the search engines and crawled with frequency. Most websites have issues in the form of crawl errors which keep search engines from indexing pages on the site. Working to remove these errors will give the search engines an easier path to crawl your content and help with SEO efforts.
First you should identify the pages that are returning the errors and start correcting the problems. Find pages with broken links using the free W3C Link Checker that you can get from http://wsm.co/fZsIGv. Then either build pages that the broken links go to or implement at 301 redirect to send users to the correct destination. You will be surprised at the impact this can have on search engine rankings.
Another opportunity to remove barriers is to reduce the amount of duplicate content on the website. Those areas that are most prone to duplicate content are title tags, dynamic URL's, meta descriptions and product descriptions. A useful tool to aid in the fight against duplicate content is Xenu Link Sleuth. The tool provides information on broken links and for possible duplication issues. Another option is Yahoo Site Explorer.
Next week we will look at site relevance and current rankings.
by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media
Facebook Ads
Facebook will generate about half of the projected $1.68 billion spent on U.S. advertising on social networks this year, and some companies are said to be spending about $20,000 per day advertising on the site. If you have not looked at Facebook ads for your own business, it might be worth investigating. Below are some tips to help you get started:
- Be as specific as possible with your keywords and demographic selections
- Use compelling images, titles and copy in your ads
- Make your ads as interactive and engaging as you can
- Frequently update and refresh the images and copy for better results
- Be vigilant about testing your ads and monitoring the results
- Bid high to get your ads approved faster by Facebook
- Start with CPC (Cost Per Click) ads if you have a very small budget, otherwise CPM (Cost Per Impression) is the better bet
- Use Facebook Ads Manager, which can be downloaded and installed on Firefox
Whether it is through a paid advertising campaign or some basic social media marketing, using Facebookâs incredible platform to help grow your business should by now be a strategy used in some capacity by every business and web professional.
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