Building a Successful Ecommerce Website
Building a successful ecommerce website is far beyond the old days of slapping up a pay pal button and performing simple search engine optimization and calling it a day. You need to build trust and have strong branding and trust factors in order to create and build a stream of daily customers. If you want your ecommerce website to function how it is supposed to in the search engines you are going to have to make some real improvements to how they function for the end user. Ecommerce websites need to create a stimulation in your audience and make them want to act and create an action your website. Let’s take a look at a Website like Wal-Mart. Why do you think they are so CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Content on a Website is So Important
I’m sure you have heard it everywhere you go on how important content is in this industry and how it is the driving force to any successful search engine marketing campaign, but why? It is important to understand exactly how the search engines work. I know many people like to keep their websites clean and clutter less but the search engines are not artificial intelligence. They are readers; they read massive amounts of information in a split second and find the most relevant information they can in order to supply the search user with what they need. With that said the better the content the easier the search engine spiders can find your business. If you don’t have enough content they don’t have enough to read CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Great Content Really Means
You've heard the entire search engine optimziation world repeatedly talk about how you need to create compelling or "great" visitor focused content. We all have heard many times that once you have great content then you will magically make you a lot of money or boost your search engine rankings like a magic carpet ride. :) Well, there may not be any magic involved, but you should always produce the best possible content for every page of your website. If you spend the time writing (or hiring a great content copywriter) content for every page of your website, generally speaking it can help your website achieve great results. These results are not only from the search engines but having great CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Industry News Can Create New Content
Search engine optimization and increasing visitors through content development is not always so straightforward. Sometimes it's a little sneaky. Not sneaky in a black hat kind of way, but sneaky in a good kind of way. I'm talking about using current events to draw new readers to your blog or website if it pertains to your industry or helps contribute to the goals of your website. Using current events and hot industry topics can provide a better user experience for your site visitors as well. You can use this strategy for any niche or industry. But suppose that a popular news item has everyone talking. Let's say it's your favorite celebrity and she's been arrested for drunk driving (of course you run a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is There An HTML Taxonomy?
While reading a blog post on Marketing Pilgrim here, I came across a writer who said he had visited a recent blog - actually, he'd clicked a link from Twitter - and read the post and left a comment. Then he, out of habit, right clicked on the page and took a look at the source code of the page only to find that he was sorely disappointed at the code. It looked like it had been done by a "drunk monkey" in 1998. I suppose that there are many old coded websites out there that rank and work well with old nasty looking code. My thought was this: If you didn't notice anything wrong with the page without viewing the source code, why then CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
User Initiated Content – Worth The Hassle?
You've no doubt heard of user generated content (UGC). It's content that users generate for you in the form of blog comments, forum postings, wiki information, etc. If a user can log in to your site and post information that you publish then it's user generated content. But what about user initiated content? This is content that you generate based on user input. For instance, a user requests that you write about a certain topic. But more often than not, a blogger will write a post about a topic because a user posted a question or left a comment and the blogger thought the comment deserved more than a response in the comments. It's called user initiated content. The great thing about user initiated content is you CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Blog Writers Selfish When They Paraphrase?
I recently read on a famous search engine optimization blog - yes it is one that you'd recognize (but one that I will not paraphrase for this particular blog post) - that, paraphrasing, most blog writers blogs have a selfish agenda, namely to secure business for themselves. Interesting, I thought, since the very idea of any business having a blog in the first place was for marketing purposes. Why shouldn't blog writers and SEO experts use the same marketing strategies that we teach our clients to use? Ironically, the same SEO blog on which this statement was made attempts to increase its business by securing customers in the same manner. Weird. Is it selfish to do this? Is it selfish to market oneself with a blog, to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Important Is User Generated Content?
UGC is the acronym for user generated content. Is it important? In terms of optimization, yes. But also in terms of your business time. Get 100 people generating content for you and that's how many pages less you have to create for yourself? Of course, there are different ways to get UGC. Here are a few: Blog comments Wikis Forums Guest writers Articles RSS feeds There are plenty of ways to get user generated content. But the search engine optimization benefits should be considered. And to be sure, not all UGC have perfect SEO benefits, but all UGC has some SEO benefit. How? Consider this: Content is SEO. Whenever your site visitors respond to your content, add their own, or provide you with UGC, that itself invites the search engines to recrawl your website CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Your Message Consistent?
Search engine optimization is very effective. You know that. But just as important as SEO is your ability to craft a consistent message across the board - in all of your search engine and internet marketing media. Whether you launch campaigns in social media, video marketing, article marketing, blogging, or all of the above and more, it is vitally important that your message be consistent. One way to maintain a consistent message in all of your media is to make it all keyword-focused. By picking your keywords and focusing on those keywords in every media you engage in, you at least show an expectation that you are focused on one niche and one aspect of that niche. But is that enough? No. I'll say it's not. Keywords are CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The New Face Of Blog Comment Spam
While approving comments for a WordPress blog I came across some comments that were clearly spam, but that were not so easily identified as spam at first glance. These comments almost snookered me, a seasoned WordPress user and comment analyzer, so I thought it might be a good idea to issue a warning. If you are a blogger, check your comments carefully. The comments in question appeared to be harmless. They were carefully crafted comments that specifically addressed the posts on which they were made. They were completely indistinguishable from bona fide comments - the kind of blog comments I like to get. They were customized just for a specific blog post, unlike most spam which is bot generated and generic. The problem with these comments, however, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is SEO Enough? No Its All About Action!
You know you've done a good job with the on site search engine optimization for your website. You've got your keywords scattered throughout your content - but not too much. It isn't stuffed. You've got inbound anchor text from internal pages and from external pages. You've got meta tags. You have gone through a lot of trouble making sure each page is optimized to the hilt. But is that enough? Well, let's just assume that you have SEOd your website so well that you have 10 No. 1 rankings - all very important keywords for your niche. Just having a No. 1 listing isn't enough to ensure that you will see click throughs. And once you get people to your site there is no guarantee that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Should You Borrow Content For Your Site?
Web content managers will often find content on another website that they'd like to use for their own. The question facing such webmasters in the content development process are not only effective in nature, but ethical as well. The most explicit question regarding content ethics is, should you borrow content from another site to use for your own? Well, it really depends on what you mean by borrow. Here are some options to explore: Write original content from scratch Borrow content from another site and rewrite it Use content from another site verbatim Use PLR content for your site Let's be frank. Writing original content is always your best option for your visitors and a search engine optimization perspective. If you can swing it, you should write your own web content. There CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Rehashing Information Is Good For The Web
There are time when blogging is accused of simply repeating or rewriting content that appears on other blogs or other web sites. I am not sure why this is seen as a negative when the practice is the life blood of the internet. Take announcements by the search engines as an example. They don't run big publicity campaigns when releasing new features, they simply publish a blog post about it. Why? They know that a thousand (or more) bloggers will pick up the post, rewrite it (often with their own views) and publish the information on their blogs. This is in a way viral marketing at its best. It is certainly now one of the fastest ways to spread the word. Why is it good for the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Should You Drop Your Blog?
I have an on again-off again client who can't seem to decide whether to keep his blog or not. He'll have us add fresh content daily for a couple of months then cancel. A couple of months later he calls us again to get his blog going. I'm going to speculate and say that he cancels his blog for budgetary reasons and that he starts it again because he notices a drop in search engine rankings. Believe me, we understand about budgets. You have X amount of dollars to spend and you can't squeeze out any more. You have to decide your priorities so that you can spend your budget on the things that matter the most to your business. That's just the way it CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Does It Matter How You Achieve The Original Content Goal?
I've seen companies taking SEO into their hands and doing some pretty strange things, but it's important as an search engine optimization professional to keep an open mind and to try to understand a company's goals before you start criticizing their strategy. Just because things don't seem to make sense, there may be legitimate reasons for doing them a certain way. We know that updating your website with original content is a necessary thing. There are several ways to accomplish that goal. First, and one of the most popular ways of updating a website today, is to put a blog on it. If you blog every day then you'll get original and unique content on your website every day. That invites the search engines to crawl CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
Nick Stamoulis - SEO Bio.
Tel. - 877-295-0620
nick@brickmarketing.com
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