A recent survey shows that 75% of businesses believe that a company blog is the most useful social media for their business. There is a good reason for that.

No. 1, a blog allows you to communicate directly with your customers. But there is one thing that can make your company blog an even better lead generation tool. Write a blog without this one thing and you might increase your business. Write a blog for your company and include this one thing and you are almost guaranteed to increase your revenues.

So what’s that one thing? Search Engine Optimization.

Yes, I’m talking about search engine optimizing your blog posts. If you optimize each blog post that you write for your company for specific keyword phrases then you stand a much better chance of gaining leads through your blog. The search engine optimization gets you better rankings so that you can attract the kind of customers that you want to attract from your marketing efforts. A blog is the best targeted and one of the most cost effective marketing tools on the planet.

The dot com marketing is saturated. It seems that all the best domain names using that TLD have been used up. Of course, due the evergrowing and changing nature of the web, there will always be domain names that pop up on the radar screen as valuable and untaken. But the longer we go on the way we have, the less likely that is to occur. It has some people speculating that other TLDs may become valuable in the future.

One of the domain names being talked about as a potential haven for investors is .travel. That could be because everyone in every country has an interest in that subject. But will it ever catch on the way that .com has?

One sure way to know whether a domain TLD has any potential or not is to see if any search results return that TLD with respectable rankings. If you query “travel answers” in Google you’ll see that www.answers.travel ranks No. 3. That’s a pretty good sign. The downside is you also get a message alongside the listing that “This site may harm your computer.”

Still, that the TLD appears that high in the search results is a good sign where search engine optimization is concerned. How often do you see TLDs appear that high that do fit into the .com, .net, .org, or .co.uk extension families?

Interestingly, all of the top 10 search results for the “travel answers” search query return the dire warning that your computer could be harmed if you click the link. Could there be some manipulation of search results going on there? I’ll let you decide, but the question remains, “Will non-.com TLDs ever be valuable?” Will we ever see a day when it will be commonplace to register a .travel TLD, or another domain name with a TLD net yet available? Will .SEO ever be a valuable TLD?

These questions are important to search engine optimizers because we live in a dot com world. And until other TLDs are treated equally by the search engines that matter, thee will always be a limit on the valuable real estate that is available.

There are two ways that you can use inbound link anchor text to help you push your web pages up in the search engine rankings. Both ways are viable, but which one you choose depends on whether you are just starting and have no rankings at all or whether you have existing pages that are beginning to rank for terms that you didn’t expect to rank for.

1. Anchor Text Trick No. 1 – This method is for new websites with no rankings yet. You know which pages you want to rank for which keywords. If you built your pages correctly, each page on your website should have at least two keyword phrases that they could rank for. It’s better if there are three or four keyword phrases per page. Target those desired keyword phrases and build your links with those phrases as your anchor text.
2. Anchor Text Trick No. 2 – This method is better if you’ve got pages that already rank but rank for keywords that you didn’t expect them to rank for. This happens and it’s nothing to fret about. Typically, you’ll find yourself on page 2 or 3 of the search engines for these key phrases, but if you build some inbound links with the right anchor text then you can push those pages up to page 1. Target those unexpected key phrases by using them as inbound link anchor text and watch your pages rise in the search engines.

How long each of these methods takes to achieve the goal depends on several factors. How many sites are competing against you for your chosen key phrases, what the authority and age of those sites are, etc. But if you are diligent and work your optimization hard then you can increase your rankings with a little link anchor text targeting.

There is no doubt that root domains are better for search engine results than subdomains, but can subdomains benefit you at all? I think so.

One reason you might want to use a subdomain for your search engine marketing and optimization for your product or service is because you have captured a search phrase and you are getting enough traffic for that phrase and a high enough search engine listing that you’ve realized it’s a valuable phrase. Google will only rank one page per domain for any particular keyword at one time. That pretty much locks you out of any future first page results for that same key phrase unless you do it on another property.

Since subdomains can often be seen by the search engines as an independent property from the root domain, you might consider going after that search phrase you’ve experience some success with as a subdomain to a viable root. If it is the case where you have a root domain ranking on page 1 for a search phrase, put your subdomain on a different root and go after the search phrase.

Another strategy to make this work is to create a subdomain on the same root domain, but make the subdomain a subniche within the one you are targeting. Make it specific and optimize the hell out of it. That subdomain can still rank for the original search phrase that your root domain captured and you’ll have two pages on Google for a specific keyphrase that you want to target.

Everyone seems to be in the market for high authority back links. That’s good because there are a lot of them out there. But what exactly is a high authority back link?

The link building part of search engine optimization has been around long enough for most people to have read up on it enough to know that you should be seeking high PR links from relevant websites within your niche. But to be honest with you, high PR links from sites outside of your niche are good links just as well. But .edu links, are they worth it?

Well, in a word, yes. Google favors links from sites with high authority within their niche. The thing about .edu sites is that they are educational institutions. The only websites with a .edu domain name are colleges and universities, institutions of higher learning. When these institutions build a website they take great care to ensure that the information they include on their sites are accurate and reliable. That’s why .edu sites are considered high authority websites no matter what their PR rating is. A PR 5 .edu site is as valuable as a PR 6 .com site simply because of the authority that is transferred from the .edu domain extension.

Google Analytics has a cool feature that I thought I’d share with you. It allows you to see at a glance where your visitors have been on your website. You can follow their navigation from entrance to exit, seeing each page’s bounce rate and entrance and exit links at a glance.

Here’s how you access this feature in Google Analytics:

1. Log in to Google Analytics account
2. Click on the account and website you want to analyze
3. Scroll down to the Content Overview box and click “view report”
4. Click on the Navigation Summary link

Here you can see what percentages of your visitors entered any particular page on your site and what percentage came to each page from previous pages. You can also see how many visitors exited from each page and what percentage went on to view other pages as well as which specific pages those visitors came from and went. This data is available for each page on your website.

At the top of your stats, below the graph, you can see how many page views each page had for the time period you are measuring. This is good information to not only make improvement to your website but also see how effective your search engine optimization efforts are over a period of time.

This information is very valuable in telling you how each page on your website relates to other pages. It can also tell you whether your ’s structure is working for you. Are people leaving your most important landing pages without visiting other pages on your website? Are they coming to your most important landing pages from other pages on your site that you didn’t anticipate? Perhaps you can find a way to capitalize on that information.

You already know why it’s important to look at your trends in analytics. But which trends are important? In a word, it depends on what type of site you are running, but there are certain trends that should be important to every webmaster. Bounce rate is generally thought of as an important metric. That is true for the most part but if your site is an AdSense site then you’d expect that your traffic is going to show up, click and ad and leave. Bounce rate might not necessarily reflect the important details for your site in that case so understand that there are exceptions to every rule.

Nevertheless, there are some important metrics to follow. I recommend that, for most websites, you should pay attention to the following metrics:

• Visitors and Unique Visitors
• Pages Per Visit
• Bounce Rate (very important for e-commerce sites)
• Average Time On Site
• Most Popular Pages
• Traffic Sources
• Keywords Trending
• Conversions
• Establish some goals and track how close you to get to achieving them

If possible, check these stats for both your organic search engine optimization results and paid search campaigns. Create custom reports to help you drill down the stats for analyzing metrical data that is unique to your site. Every webmaster has information that is important for their site but that might not be important for someone else’s site. Don’t be afraid to identify those and focus on those trends as well.