Category Archives: SEO

Removing Digital Tattoos: 5 Steps to Online Reputation Management

7 steps to excellenceWhether you’re the owner of a small business, an artist or a freelancer, your online presence can make or break you. You want to appear on the first page of a Google search, but not because of a photograph that showcases your poor judgment one night a decade ago. You’ll want potential clients to see that you recently won an award for outstanding achievement, but you won’t want them to see pictures from the after party.

Managing your online reputation can be difficult, since nothing on the Internet ever really goes away. You may need to use an online reputation management service if you’ve made some catastrophic mistakes, but most small business owners and freelancers simply want to get their names out to potential clients. When your reputation is critical to your livelihood, it’s in your best interest to protect your name:

1. Set Up a Google Alert

After choosing a word or phrase, you’ll be notified every time a relevant match appears on the Web. For example, if you put a Google Alert on YYZ Company, you’ll receive an email on either a minute-by-minute, daily or weekly basis about any new Web content pertaining to this company. It is a great way to keep track of your online reputation, though it does nothing to alter it.

2. Buy Your Domain Name

For about $11 a year, you can buy your domain name from GoDaddy.com. Buy your name in several varieties, including JohnSmith.com, JohnSmith.net, JohnSmithblog.com. Even if you’re not planning on setting up a site or blog, this helps build your online presence. When someone searches your name on Google, one of these sites — that you control — is likely to pop up, which helps push down negative content. Plus it prevents others from purchasing and using your domain name in a negative way.

3. Join Social Networks

You may have a Facebook profile for your personal life, but you may not have a page for your professional one. Today the first impression potential clients have of you or your business is made online, according to Reputation.com. Joining Web sites like YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn will give you additional help as you strive to establish and control your online persona.

4. Don’t Share Everything

As Anthony Weiner and others have demonstrated, you can very quickly end your career if you’re not careful about what you post online. Weinergate, 2011’s favorite double entendre, shows you just how much damage you can do to your career and reputation if you share more than your should. Here’s a simple question you should ask yourself before you decide to upload something: Will someone seek out another company or freelancer because I decided to post this? If the answer is yes (or even a slightly tipsy maybe), don’t post it.

5. Cleaning Up When You Fail to Follow Tip 4

Anthony Weiner has the millions to hire a PR firm to transform his image, but you probably don’t. Even so, he’s probably never going to win another major election ever again. The fact is that there simply is no way to erase your mistakes; you can only hope to change your image, to distance yourself from these errors in judgment and to make it difficult for people to stumble upon them. If an unflattering photograph on Facebook is causing the damage, you can untag yourself. If it is a poorly worded blog post, you can delete it. Only by making it harder for others to access the troubling content will you be able to move past it.

By Peter Marino – the owner of reelWebDesign.com, a website design and digital marketing company in Westchester NY.

Keyword Vs Brand Inbound Links

internet marketing strategyWith Penguin 2.0 upon us you should be adjusting your inbound link campaign accordingly. Matt Cutts (Head of Google Spam) has given us plenty of warning about Penguin 2.0 and how you should tacking your link building.

You Will Not Get Ranked With Links Alone

Internet Marketing is not just about link building anymore; you need to focus on various other factors as well if you want to perform well on search results. If you take a look at the below graph, inbound marketing does play a large part in search engine rankings, but you cannot just focus on link building.

If your website has poor onsite SEO, no regular blog posts, no social signals and no brand signals, you will never rank. Every section in the above graph is as important as the other. Do not think of Internet marketing as ranking high on Google, instead think of it as earning high traffic volume as your goal.

In this article I will be only discussing about inbound links, Brand vs Keyword. I thought I would add this note and graph so website owners wouldn’t think creating backlinks alone would earn them more traffic!

How Your Links Should Be Created

For those of you that are not 100% keyed up with inbound marketing, I will quickly go over it. Do not do any of the below:

  • Pay for backlinks.
  • Waste your time adding links in headers, footers or sidebars.
  • Join any link scheme or automated service.
  • Include your link in spammy content.
  • Have your link on irrelevant, untrustworthy sites.

Basically keep your links looking natural by guest blogging quality content with your link included naturally.

Keyword Backlinks

For many years now having keyword backlinks used to play a huge role in the positioning of your website on Google, not so much today. A keyword backlink is your targeted keyword used as an anchor text and usually pointing back to your homepage.

I believe keyword backlinks are important, but something you shouldn’t focus all your attention on. You should never only focus on your homepage, you should always build links to all web pages within your website. Every page is important, not just your homepage so build links to all.

If you wasn’t already aware, you should only try and optimize 2 main keywords for each web page, anymore than 2 will start looking unnatural. From these 2 keywords you need to build a list of variants using Google Keyword Tool and Trends. If you are using the same keyword backlinks to your pages, it will start looking unnatural. This is why having a list of variants will keep your links looking natural with the added advantage of being ranked higher for more key phrases.

Brand Links

Brand backlinks are anchor links that contain your company name, website address or a company employee. Branding is huge with Internet marketing at the minute and will be for many years.

Creating brand backlinks will increase your websites traffic on search results in the long run. The key is creating the quality content surrounding your backlink. If your end goal is to get ranked for keywords along the lines of ‘Builder London’, your content should be focused around that theme. For example, you could write an article on how buildings have evolved in London over the past 100 years. This content will be high value and of interest to users, at the same time, 100% focused on your keyword. Instead of using a keyword backlink, use a brand backlink. This way Google will connect your brand and website with the theme of your article (Builder London), thus increasing your sites authority and trust, which will then lead to higher rankings for this keyword, amongst other variants.

Brand backlinks will give your site more authority over keyword backlinks as your content will be connected to all text within the article. Not around the targeted keyword link.

Maintain A Ratio

Before reevaluating your inbound link campaign, have a company generate an internet marketing strategy for your business, not only for your links, but for blogging and social signal. If you are promoting all of these sections, your site will see a return on visitors. I would suggest creating 5 brand links for every one keyword backlink. This way your inbound links stay looking natural.

By Kev Massey – Kev is the Sales Manager at SixtyMarketing and writes the majority of blog posts for SixtyMarketing giving free, useful Internet marketing & web design tips. Please follow Kev and his team on Facebook for their latest posts.

10 Tips To Help Establish Online Authority In Your Niche

online authorityAn online business with authority will stay ahead of the competition. Of course, when looking to get to the top, one must work hard. Here are 10 tips to help establish online authority in your niche.

Organic search results: When using a major search engine, a potential customer will place a lot of value on the top results. Remember, a business that ranks highly for the main keywords will have a serious advantage against the competition. Luckily, a website owner with great content and solid links can rank highly in the leading search engines

Guest posting: A well-written guest post will build the authority of an author. To get started, the business owner should contact bloggers to swap posts. With a well-written post, a business owner will see a serious spike in traffic to his or her website.

Advertisements: When searching on Google, one will see ads. When the ads of a company appear at the top of the search results, one will gain more customers. Remember, when a business has more exposure, customers will take notice.

Articles: A business owner should write articles relevant to his or her field. Then, the expert can posts articles all over the Internet. This will help a person establish their authority and gain in the SEO results. Remember, an informative article will help the individual gain authority for the short and long-term.

Social media: Now, customers expect to see a company on Facebook and Twitter. Luckily, one can set up social media accounts in an afternoon.

Website: When making a website, one must keep customers in mind. Ideally, the webmaster should include solid and interesting content on the Web pages. When including useful information, one will have a leg up on establishing a rapport with visitors.

Book: When an author can write an e-book, he or she will gain a loyal following. Fortunately, one can write an electronic book in their spare time. When giving the material away, an entrepreneur will go a long way in marketing his or her idea to thousands of followers.

Questions and answers: There are plenty of question and answer sites on the Internet. An informed individual should sign up for these sites and start answering questions. When doing so, the site owner will gain interested and loyal followers. Using these sites can also help a business owner with their SEO results.

Videos: People love to watch videos on the Internet. When posting an informative and helpful video, an entrepreneur can garner interest in his or her product or service. Remember, with a video, one can highlight their big ideas.

Press release: When writing a press release, a company can create a buzz for a product release. To get started, an individual should research the basics of a press release. Then, the entrepreneur should write the content and release it on news sites. With well-written release, a company should build authority on the Internet quickly.

When following these 10 tips, a company should have no problem establishing online authority in their niche.

Mark Smith is a business developer and technology enthusiest who swears by the Servecorp virtual office.

6 Awesome Strategies that Will Show You How To Grow Your Business Locally

How to grow your business locallyBusinesses need to rely on either excellent marketing or local customers if they want to be successful locally. The only thing is that businesses usually have low budgets for local marketing. One optimal method of ensuring that you maximize your potential in terms of marketing is to utilize local sources of marketing and develop your business locally.  There are more than just a few methods you can get this accomplished so you need to select strategies that best fit your business model. You need to always identify the demographics of your customers before anything else and cater your efforts of marketing to them when you can.

Setting Up for Local Business
Before you launch a local campaign for marketing, make sure you are completely set up especially if you are beginning a brand new business. It is a good idea to do research of the options you plan to pursue and plan up to half a year in advance while you get your business license or settle a lease. In the case where you have already set up your business, you might want to think about local business rebranding. You need to consult your graphic designer or website developer to ensure that you have great, attractive, and professional local branding. In the long run, it will pay off.

Create Local Website
Setting up your website is the next step. This is something you should do especially when you are planning to penetrate the local market. After all, local customers search online for stuff they need using search engines. Having your site online with service details, directions and contact information is highly recommended.

Advertise with Free Ads
Use free advertising online. Sign up for a free account on Google places where you can list a service description, post a picture, list a website link, phone number and your address. Outside of Google, there are also going to be places your customers might look so get listed as much as you can. Sign up for free accounts on CitySearch, Yelp, FourSquare, Twitter and Facebook. You should set up a Facebook page and make friendly suggestions that your customers or visitors ‘like’ your account. When used regularly, these are great tools for exposing your business to local customers.

Start Blogging
If you love to write and want to share your business, your craft, offer videos, photos and tips of your business then you need to consider blogging. This could attract a throng of customers. Keep in mind that successful business blogs are the ones that give out stuff other than business promotions. They offer insight about the community or the craft. Blogs updated regularly will gain followers and can be linked to Twitter, Facebook or your website.

Network Locally
In your local newspaper business section, find out who the local reporters are and get to know them. They can, after all, be the key to getting your business promoted locally. You might first ask about advertising that is paid and then inquire if there are free listings for businesses on the website of the newspaper.  When you can, make sure you keep networking with them and other local businesses.

Get Referrals
Encourage all your website visitors and customers to write reviews on your website to help promote what you have to offer. Not all reviews might be great and if a majority are favourable they will get you more customers.

Growing your business, whether locally or online will demand a lot of time from you and the only way to succeed is by using proven strategies. Try these 6 awesome strategies to grow your business locally.

Emma Ursula is the local online marketing expert at OSI Affiliate Software providing local marketing help. When Emma is not golfing, she is always reading.