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SEO – Local Business SEO Basics Part 2: Optimizing Your Website Specifically For Your Audience
The major search engines have standards they hold all websites up to. If a website doesn’t make the cut in one area, it is considered less important and less relevant than the competition. While every online presence must cater to a target audience in order to be effective, this must be approached strategically and consistently. The good news is that if you are a local business and have geo-specific marketplace to target, you can achieve your goals in a few short months. My intention is to give you a jumpstart on creating and executing on your strategy. Before we can get into the minute details of a well-oiled and precise SEO campaign, some big picture items need to be determined. I have countless clients that approach me and my firm about wanting to rank well and get lots of traffic. Before anything of the sort can be considered and even be effective, business owners need to get clear on some things: 1) Who are you selling to? Do the people that buy your products and services even shop online for what you offer? 2) Why would anybody buy from you over your competition, and does your website communicate that clearly? 3) What are the specific results you are expecting out of your website? No, I am not the first SEO Professional to say such a thing, and I won’t be the last. Don’t let the lack of originality on the above line items cloud your mind from what I am really communicating here. You are in business for a reason. You are good at what you do, and your products are superior. The customers you serve are grateful that they met you and are happy to spend money with you again and again. You need to figure out what it is that they see in you and your employees that makes you so special, and then you need to send that message from your website without apology. At this point forget about the search engines and make your website for humans first. Make sure your audience can read it and know exactly what you are about and why you and your company are the best, period. You need to offer such a clear message and as many details as your audience could possibly want to know that by the time they make that final purchase decision, they think buying from you was their idea. From an SEO and usability perspective, the name of this game is to have specific pages of your website ranking for specific terms on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). You want to break the information up into bite-size pieces, so if the readers want to learn more, the can choose to click over to another page and keep learning. This also makes things easier for the search engines to know exactly what that specific page on your website is all about. Most people think that when they do a search in Google that they are searching the Internet. Wrong. When you type a search phrase into Google, you are searching an index of websites that Google has found and has decided is the most relevant search result to your query. So, as a website owner, it is extremely important that you keep each page of your website simple and specific so search engines can read the page, know exactly what it is about, and index it correctly. One of the most vital mistakes SEO practitioners make when they are first starting out is they put all the attention on the home page of their website and ignore all of the other pages. They often direct all external links pointing to the home page of their website only. Then they spend all their time trying to stuff all the major key search phrases they want to rank for into the copy on the home page. This is bad for several reasons: 1) While your home page is the first page of your website that comes up when people type in your domain name, it is not necessarily the page that will be the most relevant to prospective customers searching for a specific item, service, or piece of information you offer. 2) There is no way that you can possibly get the home page of your website to rank well on the SERPs if you cram it full of different key words. The rule is you should assign no more that 3 to 5 search phrases to a page on your website. A search phrase can be made up of more than one word, but you want every page of your website to be concise and specific to one topic. If you have other topics and products to offer, create more pages for your website that can give the proper attention to each of the products, services, and pieces of information your website is intended to offer. In our next installment of this article series I will get specific about how to make sure each page of your website is indexed properly, but for now, just make certain the information on your website communicates exactly what you are about, and in small concise chunks of information spread around multiple pages on your website. Copyright (c) 2011 Enliven Group LLC Sean Burrows is Managing Director of Enliven Group LLC and comes from a background in website design, interactive media consulting, web-based public relations, and search-based marketing. He is a regular guest lecturer at Westminster College’s Gore School of Business in Salt Lake City, and regularly speaks at Chamber of Commerce events, and business events around the United States. In 2005, Mr. Burrows co-founded Enliven Group, an interactive media consulting firm that manages comprehensive online marketing and public relations campaigns. Enliven Group provides services in Internet marketing, search engine optimization, website design and development, social media management, copy writing, and fully website audits. Source: Ezine Continue reading
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SEO – How to Energize Your SEO Article Marketing Campaign – 4 Highly Effective Tips for Coaches
A lot of article marketers are not really happy with the results that they’re getting from their article marketing campaign. I know so many people who are spending almost half of their waking hours writing and distributing articles online but they’re still getting minimal results. Usually, the reason why this is happening is because these people are committing costly mistakes without them even knowing it. If you’re one of them, you better read this article until the end. In here, I’ll help you figure out the things that you can do to make your campaign not only more aggressive but more targeted as well. Here’s what you need to do: 1. First is to really know your target audience. Do not write your articles without a clear idea as to what these people are looking for. Instead of relying on your instincts, conduct surveys in order to get reliable data. It’s important for you to know the exact topics and information that they need. You also need to know their preferences when it comes to the articles that they’re reading. Striving to address the needs and demands of these people is the best thing that you can do to get them to pay attention. 2. Choose interesting topics. Write topics that are not only interesting to you but to your target audience as well. As you’re selling coaching programs, your best bets are the problems that you solve. Talk about the pressing issues of your potential clients in details to give these people an assurance that you really do understand where they are coming from. Then, present them with the most logical solutions. Through this, you get to impress them while you get that much-needed chance to position yourself as an expert in your chosen niche. This is very, very important especially for esellers like you who’s selling information-based products. 3. Deliver quality, original content. Have you heard about Google’s recent algorithms change? Then, you must know that right now, the key to better page ranking is offering your readers nothing but unique (no more rehashing other articles) and high quality articles. Google will not assign better page ranking to your articles unless they offer real value to online users. Aside from making them very informative, you also need to make sure that they’re very well-written, easy to understand, and scannable. Of course, you still need to make sure that they’re properly optimized. 4. Longer is better. Longer articles are in right now. Search engines are now paying more attention to those articles that contain 800-1,100 words. For article marketers like you, this will mean sharing just a bit more information to your readers so you can completely impress these people. But make sure that you still leave them wanting for more so you can easily convince them to click through your resource box later on. By the way, do you want to learn more about how I teach my clients to build simple coaching programs that create much more revenue than just creating information products? If so, download my free guide here: How to Sell Coaching Or do you want to learn more about using articles like this to drive traffic to your website and increase online conversions? If so, I suggest you check this out: article marketing traffic . Source: Ezine Continue reading
SEO – How and When to Ping and What It Is
Pinging is a way to communicate with search engines and notify them of changes and updates to your site. Why would you want to do this and when’s the best time to do it? This article will identify when to ping, how to ping, and what it is. As I just mentioned, pinging notifies the search engines of an update or change to your site. When you make a new post on your blog, for example, you’ll want to notify search engines of this update. This is because pinging calls the search engine spiders over to your site to check out your new content. This ensures that your new content gets indexed in the search engines quickly. You want to do this because you can’t just assume that the search engine robots will find your content. They will typically eventually find it, and there are other ways to get your content noticed such as link building which can be done in a number of ways. You can use social bookmarking sites to quickly build some links to your site and your new content and this will ensure that it gets adequately crawled. The point is to build some links to your new content and like a new road Google can use that to send its spiders to your site and check out your new content to verify it. As far as when to ping, really any time you make a change to your site or add any kind of new content you should think about pinging. There are other ways to get your site indexed quickly like link building, but none are as easy as pinging generally, depending on how you go about doing it. You can’t over ping a site unless you really go out of your way to do it which you wouldn’t be doing either way, so generally the bottom line is any time a change is made to your content you should think about going ahead and doing it. Now as for how to ping, there are a number of ways to go about doing this. You can have it done automatically for you through a number of services. WordPress, the popular blog software for example, automatically pings new posts and changes to your site when you make them. Some people still don’t trust services which auto ping for you, and if your page isn’t pinged automatically there are alternative services which are still extremely simple to use. Check out this video I made showing exactly how and when to ping a web page in just a couple of seconds. Source: Ezine Continue reading