Can you undertake a search engine optimization program and a branding campaign at the same time? The answer is yes, of course you can. The follow up question: “Should You?”, is probably more important.

It is an important question as it can determine the direction of your search engine optimization program and your social marketing efforts. To answer the question, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Can you afford to wait until you have developed your brand?
2. Can you realistically develop a brand?
3. Is there strong brand competition?
4. Do you need to develop a brand?

The last question is probably the most important. If you are re-selling products then perhaps the main focus should be on the products themselves along with any existing brands. Likewise, if there are already a lot of branded products on the market, there may not be room for another one. Undertaking a search engine optimization program in such a crowded field could be difficult.

Brands can be developed on line and the rewards can be excellent. Research is now showing that most internet users are now using a brand name with the dot come before trying a search term. If you have that brand name then you will be getting a lot of direct traffic. However, that being the case, do you need to run a search engine optimization strategy on your brand name?

Whilst search engine optimization and branding do go together, the reality is that often there is no need. Branding is perhaps better left to social marketing campaigns whilst your search engine optimization program left to target products to attract organic searches. People will find brands quickly, finding products takes a little more work - that is what your Search Engine Optimization efforts should be targeting - helping the user to find your pages.

Search engine optimization is all about getting the best recognition possible from the search engines. To do this, you need to feed as much relevant information to each of the search engines.

One mistake that many web owners and web designers make is to hide their company name, their brand and some of their products inside banners. Graphics are very useful particularly when well optimized, likewise text. Banners by their nature are not search engine optimization friendly.

A banner is, essentially, a single image. If you use a banner in the header area of your screen, how has it been designed? Most web owners have a terrific banner and when it comes to marketing, it does a great job. When it comes to helping with your search engine optimization strategies, forget it.

Often, the same effect can be gained by layering the information which can then be used to compliment your search engine optimization strategies. With the use of style sheets, you can get the best of both worlds; having a banner image whilst having your company name, logo or any other data rendered as text, yet blending seamlessly with your images.

Having your company name in bold H1 text at the top of your page adds a lot of grunt to the importance of those words when it comes to search engine optimization strategies. You can have your banner and optimize it too - just separate and overlay the various components. Search engine optimization is all about what the search engines can read - not what you hide.

I’ve read in several places that the best SEO advice for putting your company name in the title tag is not a good idea. I’ll have to agree. This is just sound, solid wisdom.

If you look at the top of your browser, in the blue bar at the very top, you’ll see the title tag of the page you are looking at. Sometimes, many times in fact, you’ll see a word or phrase followed by a hyphen and another word or phrase. That first word or phrase, before the hyphen, should be a keyword-rich phrase that you want that page to rank for. Most people are not going to search for your company name, unless you are a big branded company that is well known, like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. In that case, you might want your company name first, but otherwise not.

If you absolutely must put your company name in the title tag, put it at the end, after the hyphen. You might still rank for that name, but what you really want to do is rank for the keywords associated with your company name. That’s branding through your title tag. It works and you might as well just stick to conventional wisdom.

A quick tip today regarding the branding of blogs. There are a number of things that you need to consider with your blog branding.

• Does the look and feel of the template match your business? - There is nothing worse than finding a template that is just plain inappropriate for what the site is trying to sell. Match the template to your industry in some way.

• Install to the root directory - I really hate to see blogs with /blog in their URL, it looks amateur.

• Create an original header - Headers build atmosphere, make it a good one and you will be happy that you spent the time.

Typically, when you hear marketers talking about SEO and branding, they’re not connected. Sure, you can brand yourself online. You also need to SEO your website. But did you know that you can use your SEO as a branding tool?

It’s true. The most effective elements for using SEO as a branding tool include:

• Your domain name
• Anchor text
• Alt tags
• H2 and H3 tags
• Trademarked keyword terms

I’ve talked about each one of these before, except for the last one. Just to review, a keyword-rich domain name can brand you. It also gives you a tiny edge over the competition. Of course, anchor text is always useful for SEO, but for branding? If your brand is keyword-rich to begin with, yes. H2 and H3 tags with keyword terms in them make your content stand out more. Add a color that becomes a part of every tag and you’ve got instant branding. Alt tags - same deal. Use your keywords.

Consider Google’s PageRank algorithm. It’s trademarked. Any idea why? Because it’s a branding term. Now, page rank isn’t trademarked because it represents an idea behind the PageRank trademark. That’s what makes the trademark such a powerful branding item for Google. It’s based on a popular keyword.

Of course, you can’t trademark a keyword. But you can trademark a branding version of a keyword. Let’s say, for instance, that you are a salad chef. Your most popular keyword phrase is salad chef. You can’t trademark the keyword, but you can trademark SaladChef as a variant of the keyword and use it as a branding item. Doing this prevents anyone else from taking the same variation and using it to capitalize on. It’s a powerful branding technique. Try it!

Aaron Wall recently wrote a great post on linkbait and suggests that it’s not as valuable as it once was. He recommends, instead, that modern marketers build a brand. It’s slower, but more reliable, he says.

I’m all for website branding. You know that. But I’d like to take a minute to really analyze what Aaron is saying here. First, an excerpt:

Outside of those risks, most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever. If you are selling branded CPM ads good news for you, but otherwise there is no value.

The potential upside of a linkbait driven marketing campaign is growing smaller by the day. In the third video here, DaveN hinted that he believed that Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate. Which ultimately means linkbait only creates significant value if you can keep launching one right after another.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I think the larger issue is whether you get any of the right kind of traffic from your links. Roderick Ioerger said it better on Marketing Pilgrim:

I don’t believe that just because Google or another search engine might devalue a set of links is any reason to be afraid of generating linkbait. Links that generate traffic, whether or not a search engine values them, in my mind are still good links…

I don’t think the important thing is whether you do linkbaiting or not. I think it’s whether the linkbaiting that you do is effective in driving targeted traffic to your website. With that in mind, there are three different kinds of linkbait campaigns:

1. The One-Shot Charlie - This is where you build a list or a poll or build some web page that is designed to get people excited over the short term and that is effective in building quick inbound links, but after the initial enthusiasm the inbound links begin to decline. The inbound links built at the beginning are still there, but as time progresses fewer and fewer websites and blogs link to your bait, eventually being forgotten. Remember, the links are still there so you still may get traffic to that web page months or years after the bait has been set. Is that targeted traffic? If you do it right, it can be.
2. The Long-Term Necessity - This type of linkbait involves offering a resource that people will need and use any time in the future. For instance, link popularity checkers and other webmaster tools. These type of link bait are popular and could build as many inbound links two years from now, or fifteen years from now, as they do the first day they are implemented. Since the bait being linked to is beneficial at any time to a good cross-section of people then it is a very powerful form of linkbait. The drawback is that not all of your traffic is necessarily targeted and you could feasibly get a lot of traffic from people who will never do business with you.
3. Targeted Linkbait - Another kind of linkbait campaign is the targeted linkbait. You purposely put up linkbait that is going to be attractive to specific audience within your niche. You are effectively cutting some people out, but you are doing it because you know those people won’t be interested in what you have to say. There links won’t matter to you anyway. You really want the links from the sites that fit into your niche, or a subset of your niche. Therefore, you target your linkbait to fit that segment.

Which type of linkbait you use depends on what you want to accomplish. Before the last PageRank update, many people sought to increase their PR ratings by implementing generic linkbait that any website owner anywhere might link to hoping to get a lot of high PR sites to link to them. That strategy won’t work any more. A better strategy is to use the Targeted Linkbait strategy so that you attract relevant links from relevant sites in the same niche that you are in. If you see an increase in PR from that effort, fine, but the real benefit is the traffic you get from those websites. By the way, this type of linkbaiting is also good for helping you build your brand. So it’s not really a matter of either/or, you can have both/and.

Do you know what a favicon is? If not, you should learn.

A favicon is one sure way to ensure that your website stands out in a crowd. It’s a branding item that appears in your site visitors’ browser window next to your URL. By uploading a favicon to your web server to be used on all of your web pages, you not only make your website more brandable, but you also increase your credibility and memorable.

Does the favicon have any SEO benefits? Not that I’ve seen, but you can convert your favicon (an .ico) file into a .jpg, increase its size, and use it as an image on your website. What many companies do is take their company logo and turn it into an .ico file to use as their favicon. Either way is OK, but you get better mileage out of your images that way.

You should name your favicon with the image name of favicon.ico. That’s the universal recognition of the file and search browsers will automatically show it to your site visitors in the proper location.

Creating a favicon is easy. Just go to http://www.favicon.cc/, a favicon generator, and you can have your very own favicon within five minutes. After creating your favicon, just upload it to the root directory of your website and add the following code to your header:

link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico”/

Don’t forget to surround the syntax with brackets that look like < and >. Now you’re all set with your favicon.

Aaron Wall wrote in WebProNews that 35% of all search queries are brand related:

Approximately 35% of the top searches in the UK, USA and France are brand related, which gives you an idea just how brand focused our Live Search users are. If your brand is strong (and strong brands come in all shapes and sizes) include it in at least in one of your ad titles and try to get it in the descriptions too! We have often seen click through rates (CTRs) increase when brand names have been included effectively.

If you don’t believe that branding yourself online is important, you’d better start believing. I believe this figure will get higher the more people start searching online for products and services. Already, more than 90% of searchers go online to research products and services to purchase, but most of them drive to make the purchase. What do you think they are searching for? A significant number of them, it appears, are looking for specific brands.

Here’s what I think that means: If you are a retailer that sells brand items then you should create web pages for those brands on your website. By using recognized brands to brand your own website and company you can assist searchers in finding the products and services that they are looking for through the search engines.

Google Website Optimizer is a pretty useful tool. Don’t you think? Now, after a year, they’ve added a snazzy new A/B split tester. If you’re inclined to running A/B split tests, I’d put this on the essential tool list.

Mr. SEO was interviewed by Kevin Levi at Small Business Branding and he tells us how to use SEO to brand your business. He has some pretty useful tips on link building, using SEO tools (he recommends Trellian and Overture), and putting the right keywords to work for you.

Over at Search Engine Land this morning they’re talking about how to brand a small business online. The thing that stood out in my mind in this particular blog post was this small paragraph:

Let’s look at this from anther angle. What is the effect of branding on an unknown audience? The most effective branding is not in the number of people you reach, but in the number of times you’re able to reach any single person with your brand.

There’s no doubt you can, and should, brand your business if you intend to do any business online. Branding is perhaps more important online than off line - at least, for small businesses. So how can you use these three little tidbits to brand your business online? Here’s how I’d suggest:

• Do some keyword research in your niche
• Study your competition (what are their strengths and weaknesses?)
• Decide on which keywords you want to use for your website
• Build your web pages, two pages for each keyword
• Use Google Website Optimizer’s A/B split tester to see which web page works best for your keyword
• Make sure you use your keywords in such a way that you are associated with them
• Finally, and this is vitally important, don’t try to be all things to all people - pick a target market and impress the hell out of them.

Share your small business branding tips. What are you doing successfully?

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

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