Category Archives: SEO

What Mobile Marketing Means For You

Facebook Marketing, Mobile Marketing, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketing, ,

Mobile marketingThe technological world has opened up many doors for advertising via mobile.  Virtually everyone has some sort of mobile device that connects to the internet, be it a phone or one of the numerous tablets available today.  This has opened opportunities for the “old time” internet marketing to go mobile, and many businesses are taking full advantage.

E-mail

A good mobile marketing service will tell you that e-mail is still a killer way to reach your audience and get more business.  The key is to get them to sign up for the e-mails.  How is that done?  Offer them something in return.  Many restaurants offer a free dessert or appetizer in exchange for signing up for their emails.  How do they adapt this to the mobile era?  Make the coupon one that does not have to be printed.  Rather allow the user to simply show their mobile device and have it scanned, and they receive the free item or discount.  This works for other businesses as well and generally it works best if perks come periodically.  This keeps customers opening those emails.

Text Messaging

A great many businesses are offering text promotions similar to email lists.  Customers can test a simple message to a simple number and receive periodic updates from the company.

The technological world has opened up many doors for advertising via mobile marketing. Virtually everyone has some sort of mobile device that connects to the internet, be it a phone or one of the numerous tablets available today. Obviously the Kindle Fire and the iPad are the most popular, but there are also other brands of tablet computers out there these days.

The same hook works here.  Typically a discount or free items is offered at sign up, and then occasionally a text will come that offers an exclusive discount by simply showing the text when making the purchase.  This is another area where a mobile marketing service can help out, as they can handle all of the incoming and outgoing texts for any campaign and relieve the business owner of those duties.

Social Media

Facebook and Twitter campaigns have been popular for a while, but mobile devices now allow customers to participate anytime, anywhere.   And increasing number of businesses are making Facebook promotions available by showing the mobile device as well as printing, meaning it is no longer necessary to find a printer before taking advantage.  These campaigns can grow very rapidly, with Facebook responses and Tweets reaching into the thousands quickly.  A mobile marketing service can focus on all of this, as well as monitor the sites involved; ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

With the world of mobile marketing growing by leaps and bounds, it is wise for business owners to find help when it comes to starting and maintaining a successful mobile marketing campaign.  While in the beginning it may not be a big deal, a mobile marketing service can definitely be beneficial in long term. To learn more about mobile marketing services, click here.

Lisa Swan writes for a variety of computing websites. She lives in New York City.

Seven Tips For Engaging And Traffic Generating Content

Blogging, content marketing, Copywriting, guest blogging, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , ,

content marketingWebsites tend to be the first place that your customers turn to in order to find the information about your company, products or services that they want. Most businesses today know that having an online presence is important, which is why most companies today have a website.

Along with simply having a website, the content on your website is important. You need to make sure that your site contains information that your audience wants, and you also want to make sure it includes the information that will give you a better chance at having a solid SEO strategy.

In order to create the best possible content for your website, you need to implement the following tips.

1. Be concise.

Internet users don’t have hours to spend reading the content on your website, so don’t bombard them with long pages full of copy. In fact, if a reader believes that your content is too long, they’re not going to stay and read what you have to say. Make sure that your content is clear and concise. Don’t write fluff copy. Instead, stick to the point, and give your readers exactly what they want.

2. Use headers.

Most Internet users will scan websites before deciding whether or not they’re going to read the copy. This is why it’s extremely important to use headers on your website. This allows you to break your content up into appropriate sections and allows your readers to easily find what it is that they’re looking for.

3. Format appropriately.

The format of your content is important. If your content is formatted in a way that allows your readers to find information in a clear and easy way, it’s going to attract them to your site. Be sure to keep your paragraphs short, use bullet points when appropriate, and always bold your headings. The better your content is formatted, the more attractive it will be for your audience.

4. Stay active.

Your readers are scanning your content in real time, so make sure that you are always using active voice and calls to action to help your audience stay interested in your content and stay on your site.

5. Proofread your work.

The last thing you want to do is work hard on content, publish it, and find that you have spelling or grammatical mistakes. Make sure that you are always proofreading your work before you launch it live on your site. Have other people read through the content to ensure it’s perfect, and even use a spelling and grammar checker like Grammarly grammar check online tool to help ensure your content is complete and error free.

6. Add content to all pages.

Search engine crawlers will look at every web page that has content, so in order to give your website the best advantage for being ranked on search engines, you want to make sure you have content on every page. Even a sentence or two can help boost your site’s rankings.

7. Don’t forget about your images.

Images and videos on your site should have alt tags that contain content. These items are also scanned by search engines, so adding keywords to these videos and images will help your site’s SEO strategy.

Our Guest Blogger – John Martinez is a marketer and freelance writer currently living in San Francisco. John loves teaching interactive marketing and SEO techniques.

Internal Linking: 3 Best Practices For 2013

SEO, Small Business Marketing, , ,

Internal linking

When it comes to SEO, we’re often focused completely on the practice of building our catalog of external links for our clients’ websites. But just as important is the practice of building your repertoire of internal links. If you consider any link as a recommendation of your site in the same way you consider external links recommendations to Google that, “Hey, this site has good content,” then why wouldn’t you recommend your own content and web pages to Google? This is why Internal Linking is such an important tool of SEO specialists, especially if you have a well-ranked high authority site already. You can use your well-trafficked and highly ranked pages to direct spiders and users to more content such as a limited-time campaign “recommended” by the high authority page. Likewise, internal linking provides important navigational features to your site that help users orient themselves and find what they want on your site without having to use search boxes or find orphan pages.
In the year 2013, these are mistakes nobody should be making, but there are also some important things you can do that your competitors might not be that can help you get an edge on the competition.

1. Link to Your Most Profitable/Converting Pages

It goes without saying that at the end of the day companies hire SEO specialists and Internet marketers to help them make money. So, as someone in one of those positions, you want to drive users to the most profitable and highest converting pages on a client’s site. Therefore, the more inbound links to that page, the more you’ll show up in the search engines and (hopefully) get more traffic. Of course, don’t just post href HTML codes everywhere, but don’t neglect the fact that many very profitable businesses put “most popular items” or “recently searched” in their top navigation. You already know these are highly converting pages, so why wouldn’t you try and increase exposure of these pages?

2. Link to Relevant, Related Pages

Nobody wants to have excessive links on a web page. It looks messy, cluttered and overly aggressive on behalf of the business. That being said, most web sites actually underutilize internal links rather than abuse them. If you’ve ever been a regular browser of Wikipedia, you’ll know that providing links to related, relevant and quality content can drive traffic to other pages you wouldn’t have originally considered. That’s why in your SEO strategy you should be utilizing SEO to link to related content on a regular basis. For example, if your client’s site runs a blog and the client has a web page or another blog on a related or relevant subject, you might want to consider linking to these pages. Say your site had a page on landscaping, and you wrote a blog about landscaping. This would be a great time to internally link to that central web page or an earlier blog about a similar landscaping service. Though it may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many webmasters, content developers and SEO specialists neglect to do this. Google also gives a boost to pages linked with relevant anchor text to the page’s content–which as you’ve just seen is something you can easily do.

3. Provide Breadcrumb Navigation

I can’t think of a web browser that doesn’t have a back button, but that doesn’t mean you should let your users rely on it. Breadcrumb navigation (i.e. linking back to a more broad page from one with a narrower scope or focus) is often forsaken in favor of users’ browser back buttons. Nevertheless, breadcrumbs are a great way of ensuring your pages aren’t dead-ends, enhancing the navigational experience for users as well as sneaking in a couple extra internal links. Retail outlets and e-commerce sites such as Wal-Mart and Amazon are common users of this strategy for their sites, and clearly they’re doing pretty well in the search engine rankings. Why shouldn’t you? As an added plus, it again also allows you to easily and thoughtlessly add relevance to web pages with anchor text that is almost undeniably related to the web page in question.

Our guest blogger is Ricardo Casas is the CEO and founder of Fahrenheit Marketing LLC, an Austin, Texas based internet marketing company. With over a decade of experience in the field, Ricardo has seen the field change dramatically and knows how to adapt quickly to the pressures of the rapidly changing world of SEO.

What To Do When Your Google Rankings Take A Dive

Blogging, content marketing, guest blogging, SEO, Small Business Marketing

When your Google ranking declinesIf you’re an online business or your business has an online presence then there are few worse feelings than going to check on your page 1 ranking which is bringing in most of your sites traffic, and finding that it’s now on page 5. That’s enough to make any online marketer and online business owner lose sleep. Rankings positions are hugely important if you want your business to succeed, the difference between being ranked number 1 and number 20 in Google is immense as if you’re ranked 20th you pretty much might as well not be ranked at all. When was the last time you searched for something on Google and clicked on a result on page 2 or 3? If your rankings have taken a dive all of a sudden then now is not the time to panic, it’s time to find out why and get your rankings back to where they were so let’s take a look at what you need to do.

Find Out Where You Are

If you have a search term that you have been ranking on page 1 for and all of a sudden it’s gone then the first thing you need to do is to find out where it’s gone to. Are you still in the top 20, 50, 100? If you have slipped into page 2 or 3 then it’s not so bad and it won’t be too hard getting back to where you once where but if you have fallen out of the top 100 altogether then you might have problems. There are tools you can use to tell you where you are ranking but they aren’t always reliable so I prefer to search for them manually. Just make sure to clear your browser search history and sign out of your Google account and they can distort the results.

Learn Lessons

You should use the experience of losing your good ranking positions as an opportunity to learn lessons and improve your website and your online marketing strategies. If the latest algorithm shake up by Google has hit your site in an undesirable way then you need to take their not so subtle hint that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing. This doesn’t mean that you need to pander to everything that Google wants but it provides an opportunity for you to take a look at yourself and find areas that you can improve so that your customers get the best possible experience and service when they visit your site.

What Are You Missing?

You may find that your website needs a blog so that you can regularly update it with fresh content, not just for the sake of it but to provide visitors with exciting, entertaining and educational content. That could make your site more popular as people will use it to find out about the latest news and developments in whatever industry it is that you are working in. That’s how brand reputations are built and improved.

You may find that you need to earn links from more relevant and reputable websites. Gone are the days when you could submit your website to a few online directories and see your rankings sore. Today you will need to earn links in a natural way from high quality websites within the same or at least a similar industry to yours and the only way to do that is to make the best possible website and put genuine effort into your marketing strategies.

Don’t look at a drop in rankings as the end of your SEO and online marketing efforts, instead look at it as an opportunity to create the website and online brand image that you’ve always wanted. If you put your customers first then it’s inevitable that you’ll get the links you want, the visitors, Facebook likes, Twitter followers and your rankings will improve once again.

Don’t Worry About Old Links

Lots of people waste time contacting websites that are linking to them asking them to remove there link to the site which they believe is harming their rankings. This is a waste of time as Google have acknowledged that they ignore low quality links and instead focus on the high quality ones so leave the old links and focus your efforts on earning high quality ones, not by asking for them, buying them or exchanging but by making your site a true source of knowledge, information, excitement and quality within your industry.

By Stuart Cooke an online marketer who owns Pinnacle SEO and he gets lots of clients asking him to improve their rankings after they’ve taken a dive.