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Rembember the days of meta tag domination – when all you had to do to get a first page ranking in search engines was to have a few keywords in your meta tags? Those days are over. Search engine marketing has morphed into a complex beast consisting of domain authority, page rank, follow/no-follow, and social cues, just to name a few. With all the complexities that have appeared in search engine optimization over the last 10 years, many people have shifted towards strategies of trying to influence the search engines by getting thousands of crappy links pointing to their sites using unnatural and automated methods. That was effective in the last several years but now that Google is getting smarter and penalizing for trying to game the system, using “black-hat” SEO techniques can actually hurt your rankings.
You may or may not have heard this recently, but SEO seems to have introduced a new sibling into the online marketing family: ASO (or App Store Optimization) is the online marketing of mobile apps through items like their descriptions, keywords, titles, and more. Because apps are marketed somewhat similarly, but not the same way as traditional web content, the industry has dubbed this area of optimization accordingly by giving it the name ASO, and thus identifying the “store” as the means through which one attempts to market their app successfully.
Today’s article is about the initial setup of your B2B search campaign. It also touches on the parallels between old-school B2B sales tactics and search engine marketing.
There is a good way and a bad way to do everything, but for some reason when most people start carrying out SEO on their website they choose the bad way. The good way will work and you will get the results you deserve. The good way will cement your top spot in the rankings for lots of different keywords and you will have an endless stream of traffic that visit your site and buy your products. The bad way means you will get no results, or if you do they will be so small that they’re not even worth patting yourself on the back over. You will end up working yourself so hard that your only option is to throw in the towel. Do you know why you’re doing it the wrong way? The differences can be tiny and we’re going to look at them right now so you can change your ways.
There are a million SEO mistakes we can make. Well, actually you’ll get over 4 million results when you search for “seo mistakes”! You could getlost in the most technical aspects of SEO as you try to understand rich snippets, multiple location business listings, disavowing links, rel=canonical and a host of other things. How nice to get the Google Webmaster Guru – Matt Cutts – to lay out the top 5 seo mistakes (by volume) that he sees.
SEO can take hours, days, months, and years to utilize on your blog, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ‘quick fixes’ as well. The main idea of SEO is that you keep doing it in order to keep getting results, but if you don’t have a lot of time on your hands, here are a couple of quick tips for improving SEO on your blog that you can likely look into during your lunch break. None of these options will take longer than fifteen minutes (unless you take your time) so you can check them off of your to-do list whenever you have a spare minute or two.
Local SEO is probably one of the toughest on-line marketing strategies to implement. This is partly because of Google’s strict local algorithm, which takes into account several factors. Long gone are the days where you could build a large amount of links and expect your local business to rank on the first page. Link building is one of multiple factors that Google takes into consideration when placing you on the coveted first page of a local search result (7 Pack). The purpose of this article is to provide readers with quick action steps on how to place your local business at the top of the local SERPS (search engine results page).
The first thing that you need to know about the Meta Description Tagis that it no longer actually contributes to SEO or your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings. So why the title? Because the meta description tag is still part of most SEO services, plug-ins, software packages, and discussions. The Meta Description Tag is a statement describing the content of the webpage. It is not visible to website viewers (unless they know where to look), but is visible to search engines. It makes up the content that usually appears on lines 2 & 3 (below the title) of your listing on the SERP. It is your first opportunity to “sell” to your potential visitor – definitely worth putting some time into.
Digital Marketing Power - My Curation Topic
I've been fascinated with digital marketing and its possibilities ever since the term was coined. I guess that's because I've been professionally involved in sales and marketing for over 20 years now, way before the invention of the internet. I remember trying to think of a suitable title to encapsulate what digital marketing means to me and I realised that the word POWER had to be in there. When you think about it, when has there ever been a time in the history of commercial marketing and PR where a one man band or small business could compete with a multinational or global business. Digital marketing (when executed correctly) can level the playing field. My objective with 'Digital Marketing Power' is to select the best content from the best content producers around the world based on the following 3 key principles; 1) Education - provide hot tips and advice which you can use in your business immediately to make a difference 2) well written and nicely presented content for your enhanced experience and 3) evergreen content - so you can go back and reference this material regularly if you so choose. This is not a news site. Finally, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention my business, Gary Hitching Associates. I'm a business development consultant and specialise in lead generation, sales and customer retention for mainly SME businesses. Digital marketing and social media marketing are very significant components of my business development toolkit. Please feel free to visit my website and download a free copy of my 'Marketing Audit Checklist' www.garyhitching.com
After offsite engagement for awareness, the next step along the route to revenue looks at the "Consideration" phase where engagement – as well as other factors – can affect click-through rates (CTR) in search results, an oft overlooked, and underrated metric in the world of SEO. First a caveat! CTR studies are both fun and farcical. When no two search results are the same, predicting the percentage of click-throughs in certain positions, and leveraging that as a prognostication of actual traffic can, at best, provide directional data and, at worst, leave clients unhappy when targets fall short. .
Here’s another misconception: “PDF pages are so SEO-unfriendly that you can’t rank for any halfway competitive keywords with them“. Some SEOs are still so set against the Portable Document Format pages that they don’t feel they should even be landing pages. Some such SEOs recommend replacing all PDFs with HTML pages or building additional HTML landing pages targeting the same keywords as the PDFs. The truth is: the biggest reason PDF pages often rank so horribly is that they are rarely properly optimized.
I’m no SEO expert, but I think I’ve developed a bit of a knack for getting some decent organic search results from blog posts. All I’ve done is utilised a few basic SEO practices, so I thought I’d share them in the hope that it inspires others to make similar changes.
There are a ton of expensive SEO tools available. Many of them do a great job but you shouldn’t forget the great data and insight that can be gleaned from free tools. These tools are often overlooked.
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Social media optimization (SMO) was originally designed to drive traffic from social media sites such as bookmarking sites and social networks. However, SMO is now significantly more important and not simply because social networking has grown but because SMO also improves SEO performance. Good SMO will drive traffic from both direct social site referrals and from search engines.
It’s true that Google wants the most relevant and quality results at the top of their SERPs, but we can’t overlook the fact that they also want popularity. Your company might be the cool (and smarter) new kid in school, but those that are established and already deemed “popular” are going to stay at the top for a little while longer. This might not seem fair, but in the way of SEO there are really two ways to look at the dilemma. Read on..
Many factors contribute to a website reaching and maintaining high positions in search results for target terms. These factors include user experience, site structure, alt tags on images, site maps, and more. Above all content is definitely still king. However, not all types of content can rule over the kingdom of SERPs. The following are 10 tips for writing content that will help your website rank higher in search results:
SEO copywriting might seem boring and uncreative at first, and it can at times be very repetitive. But balancing search engine optimization with content marketing does not limit creativity. In fact, this unique combination often requires and strengthens the writer’s creativity.
Writing content that satisfies both human readers and search engines is not an easy feat because the writer must deliver content that both of them want. This means understanding as much as possible about the human audience.
Did you know Google can make your blog disappear from its search results? One day, you’re getting a nice little trickle of traffic to a few of your posts. No, it’s nothing major, but it grows with every new post you publish, and you can see Google becoming a major source of traffic for you in the future. But then it stops. Poof, every single post and page of your blog disappears from Google. No warning, no alarm bells, nothing. You’re just gone, like you never even existed. And the worst part? You don’t even know why. It just feels like the biggest, baddest bully on the Internet decided to knock the crap out of you, leaving you whimpering and bleeding, wondering what on earth you did wrong.
Small business on a tight budget looking to promote their business in 2013 might want to consider making this the year they start tweeting. eMarketer projects Twitter to expand to 36.3 million monthly U.S. users in 2013, up from 31.8 million in 2012. Twitter can be a great way to drive traffic to your website. Twitter is free to use and if done properly, tweeting can be a powerful tool in helping your site get found while raising your rankings on search engine results pages. One of the quickest and easiest viral campaigns you can start right away that can increase your SEO rankings is to start a Twitter petition.
Looking for a nice selection of SEO power tools that will help diagnose technical issues and optimize your website, or perhaps gain insight on what your competition is doing? Here are 13 helpful SEO tools (many of them free) worth your time.
Pinterest is perfect for businesses with small marketing budgets, and you can improve SEO and drive traffic by optimizing your images. The image-based social media site is an online bulletin board that lets you collect and share images by “pinning” them to virtual boards. It has been one of the fastest-growing consumer Web properties — according to comScore, it ranked 28th among U.S. Internet users in January, with about 30 million unique visitors. Pinterest users spend more money, shop more frequently, and purchase items more often and in larger quantities than users on any other social network. If you believe that Pinterest is a viable social media marketing platform for your business and your initial attempt at using it hasn’t yielded the positive results you were looking for, it’s time to optimize your presence — starting with the images you post.
Quality content seems to be the main edifice on which any SEO campaign can gain a deep-rooted search presence. You share quality content with the groups, circles, or people you're connected with on various social media platforms. If that content is valuable and informative, only then does it have the potential to be shared further, go viral, and reap the targeted return on investment (ROI).
Let’s face it, blogging is not easy. The hardest part can be thinking of good things to write about. There are only so many different ways that you can talk about the Super Bowl Ads and when you’ve exhausted all options, you’re just left with writer’s block. When it comes to SEO, without good content you can’t grow your rankings. You may find yourself searching for ideas on how to generate fresh content. Here are some great tips from a recent SEOmoz webinar called 'how to blog like you mean it', which should help the next time you find yourself staring at the wall.
Neil Patel, founder of KissMetrics was recently interviewed about SEO link building. Best practices, misconceptions, and future insights for 2013 and beyond were discused in this in interesting video.
Develop a keyword strategy that will have a much higher success rate and provide you with the results you are looking for.
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