Research is the Make or Break for your Search Marketing
If you have decided to start marketing a business or website online one of the most important steps or aspects of conducting your entire search engine marketing campaign is your keyword research. Keywords are your audience and get this step wrong and you will get your audience wrong. The last thing you want to do is market yourself online through search engine optimization and pay per click advertising for many months only to find out your keywords have been pulling in the wrong audience. There are many different philosophies on keyword research. Some like to focus on many keywords and some like to just focus on one or two highly trafficked words. Personally putting all your eggs into one basket is never a good idea, period. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why The SEO Industry Is Growing
Every day there seems to be a greater number of people competing for search engine optimization business. The question that begs to be asked is, Why? Why are there so many people trying to break into the SEO business? It is likely they've heard that it's a lucrative field. But there are plenty of other lucrative fields that are holding fairly steady right now. Many of them require a person to work a lot harder - in terms of physical labor - than optimization work does. Could that be the reason that the SEO industry is seeing so many new upstarts? I think there is the perception that SEO is easy work. Easy money. After all, what do you do all day? You look at websites and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
A Marketing Strategy That Reduces Duplicate Content
If you are concerned at all about duplicate content for your search engine optimization effort then there is one marketing strategy that you should adopt right away. If you pursue this marketing strategy then you'll never get dinged for duplicate content. Ever. Guaranteed. It's article marketing. OK, not traditional article marketing. That relies on mass distribution and you could conceivably run into duplicate content issues if you have an article floating around at the thousand different websites. But there is another kind of article marketing where that will never happen. The kind of article marketing that I'm talking about is where you write an original article and submit it to ONE - and only one - website. If that site owner rejects the article then send CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Does Your Search Marketing Ooze Trust
The economy has been down and everyone has felt the pinch over the last 12 months or so. Things do seem to be on the up side these days and so with Christmas looming on the horizon, how well prepared is your search engine marketing and optimization? I was struck by a couple of statements on Search Engine Journal about landing pages. The first says a lot about the current state of search marketing: Landing pages are becoming overly complicated data dumps where the short attention spanned consumer is left to sort through the pop-ups, multiple focus points, talking heads and flashing pictures. There is certainly a lot of overkill when it comes to landing pages. The post on SEJ centers around seven tips to increasing CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How To Become An Authoritative Website
If you conduct a search you will often find there are one or two results, usually near the top of the SERP, that have a set of links below the description. This is particularly true at Google. Those additional links are for internal pages to that website. How does one become one of those sites that has these additional links and is that a beneficial thing to have? To answer the second question first, yes, it is beneficial. It sets your website apart from every other website that shows up for that search query. It also means the search engine considers you a trustworthy and authoritative site for that search result. But that doesn't answer the question, How do you get there? The answer to the hows CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Does Your Aged Site Have Too Many Wrinkles?
Domain age, page age, and link age are all important for your search engine optimization. Especially with Google, an older site has a much better chance of ranking well for a particular keyword. That may be because an older site has a lot of other things going for it - more links, etc. But it's also likely because Google's age-factor algorithm tends to favor older sites as more trustworthy. The reality is, however, that brand new sites may have more to offer searchers on the most relevant and up-to-date information. So there is a balancing act with regard to relevance that the search engines have to perform in order to deliver information to searchers. How do you know when your website is too old? While the age ranking CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Search The Right Channel For You?
Rand Fishkin wrote a great blog post in answer to this question posed by someone, "If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose?" First off, Rand and I both agree that's a ridiculous question, but it's useful in that it opens up a philosophical jar of worms that most search marketers aren't willing to explore. He answered the questions much the same way I would have. Which Internet marketing channel is right for you depends on a number of factors, including your own internal resources. But what about search specifically? If you could spend any amount of money and choose any number of Internet marketing channels to market your business CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What’s More Important For Rankings, Bounce Rate Or Links?
I'm becoming more and more convinced every day that Google is diminishing importance on inbound links and increasing importance on visitor traffic patterns, particularly bounce rates. Google's complex ranking algorithms are constantly in flux. It's change or be changed. Why would visitor bounce rates be more important than inbound links? For several reasons. No. 1, inbound links have been gamed much too often and in too many sordid ways. Rising traffic patterns mean that a site is growing in popularity and is an indication that site visitors may be helping a website grow by sharing pages and information from that site with their friends. Since many website visitors are not webmasters and therefore not capable of providing links, they can still "vote" on the quality of a page CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Would You Find In An Internet Marketing Textbook?
Veteran online marketer Seth Godin wrote a great blog post on textbooks. It got me thinking. If there was a college textbook on Internet marketing, how much of it would on the subject of search engine optimization? How much would discuss search engine marketing? My guess is very little. It's not that SEO and SEM aren't important. They are. But there is a lot of ground to cover with Internet marketing, items regard excellent content, website structure, etc. There are so many other topics that could be covered in a class as well. One could probably fill an entire college semester on SEO alone. But that wouldn't be advisable. A dedicated student would learn a lot more just by jumping in and doing it themselves. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are You Optimized For The Right Search Type?
There are three different types of search undertaken by users; transaction, information and navigation. Each search type can be accessed using keywords that are appropriate to each classification. For example, navigational searches are generally quite specific in that they are looking for a particular web site by name. This is where branding is particularly important. The informational searches are often dominated by blogs and sites such as Ask, About and perhaps even Yahoo! Answers. The information area is one of the most competitive on the web, particularly if you consider the number of blogs in existence these days. The third group, the transactional type of search, is the area that most online business need to concentrate on. These searches often include words like 'buy' or 'download'. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Local Search Takes On A Whole New Importance
If you have a brick and mortar business and you haven't optimized for local search yet then perhaps it is time you did completed the on site search engine optimization. Local search is about to take on a whole new dimension and I can only see it growing - that new dimension? Smartphones and Google Earth. The Google Lat Long Blog yesterday reported on a new feature to the Google Earth for iPhone application that they call their "Business layer". What will it mean to business? If you have a web presence and have taken the opportunity to claim your business through Local Search - plenty. The application will enable users to find businesses like restaurants, bars, banks, gas stations, and grocery stores CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Name Brand Or Meta Description? Which Wins In The SERP?
You might think that if your stiffest competition is a recognized name brand and you both appear in the SERPs then you'll lose the war on clicks. That's not necessarily true. We all know reality. You can be No. 1 for your keyword and a name brand at No. 2, who do you think will get the most clicks? You'd think that it would be No. 2. People aren't going to click the first result just because it's the first result. Most people won't anyway. Recognized name brands do have an edge, but they aren't a shoe-in. You can beat a recognized name brand if you write your meta description correctly. It can actually sway the tide in your favor. So what's the correct way to write CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Monetize Your Visitors Through SEO or Social Media?
You know the value of analytics. Measure your traffic, test your content, etc. etc. etc. And you've likely heard that most traffic to websites comes from search engines, Google in particular. It's actually starting to change. Yes, Google still sends the lion's share of traffic for most websites. And an aggregated traffic from all search engines is still greater than the traffic from social media sites. But there are some webmasters who are able to see more traffic coming from specific social media sites like Digg and Twitter than from Google and the other search engines. If that happens to you, what should you do? In a word, you capitalize. Traffic is traffic. Monetize it. That's easier said than done. But if you can monetize search traffic then CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Display Advertising, Search Marketing Are Connected
If you thought display advertising was dead online then here's a study that might change your mind. The interesting thing is you can benefit through search with an effective display advertising plan. What do these figures really say? The study shows that Internet users initially respond to the medium as follows: 31percent responds by directly clicking on an ad; 27 percent respond by searching for a product or brand on a search engine; 21 percent respond by typing the company Web address into their browser and visiting the website; and 9 percent respond by using social media. Overall, 52 percent of Internet users actively respond to display advertising. Here's the statistic worth noting: 27% searched for product by brand. This illustrates how important branding really it. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Is Search Engine Saturation?
Search engine saturation is a term you don't hear too many optimization folks talking about any more. But it's a useful term and you need to know what it is. In a nutshell, it refers to the number of pages you have indexed in the search engines. Search engine saturation is your gauge for how effective you are in getting search engine listings. It's one of the gauges for how effective you are at search engine marketing in general. Let's say you have a website with 100 pages. If 90 of those pages are indexed at Google, 75 are indexed at Yahoo!, 80 are indexed at MSN, and 65 at Ask.com, you'd say that your search engine saturation is a sum of those. That is, 310. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
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