How Will You Define Your SEO Success?
What is your “magic number” of success? How many orders shipped, new clients signed or dollars earned would it take you make you jump for joy in your office? Success, even when applied to our businesses, is a very personal definition. For instance, having a sufficient (and steady) workload to justify hiring a new employee might be how you judge your success. Or maybe you are looking to cross the million dollars in revenue mark. Success might even come with a better work-life balance. Just like our definitions of business success vary, so do our definitions of SEO success. However you define SEO success, here are three things to keep in mind. Don’t be so afraid of negative results. A slight dip in visitors from day to day (or even month to month) isn’t the end of your website. As a site owner, I know how easy it is to get lost in the overwhelming pages of data available and see doom in every number. Relax. It’s more important to take a step back and look at the big picture. What overall trends are you seeing? These are a much better indication of your SEO success. Sure, there may be outliers that CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Should You Organize Your Blog Commenting?
Blog commenting is in incredibly useful form of link building for multiple reasons. Not only is a great way to get a valuable inbound link, it can also help build your online brand, improve your reputation as an industry expert, is the first step in developing a blogger outreach program and much more. However, just like you need to keep your link building strategy organized, it’s important to organize your blog commenting activities organized so you can get the maximum value for your time. Here are 4 reasons why it’s important to organize your blog commenting: 1. You don’t want multiple people commenting on the same post. Having multiple people from your company post comments on the same blog posts looks bad for a couple of reasons. First CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The SEO Importance of Original Content
In light of last’s month post outing now infamous (and new Internet meme) Ocean Marketing for plagiarizing from this very blog, I thought it was important to stress the importance of original content, which is imperative for online marketing success. Not only the foundation of good SEO, content also feeds your social media marketing campaign, builds your overall online presence and helps establish consumer trust in your brand. Content it far too important to outsource to cheap writers, and too closely intertwined with your brand to try to get away with plagiarizing. Original content gets links. Even if you have never actively engaged in any kind of offsite link building, chances are your website has developed a small link portfolio of natural links CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Ways B2B Companies Can Leverage Social Media
Social media is not just for B2C companies! In fact, some studies have shown that B2B companies are seeing better results with social media marketing than many B2C brands are. Here are three ways B2B companies can better leverage the power of social media to help their own bottom lines. Use social media in conjunction with offline activities. Social media is already a huge component of B2B tradeshows, with conference hashtags making it easy for attendees to stay up-to-date no matter where they are, companies live blogging during presentations and so forth. But social media marketing can be integrated into other forms of offline marketing like direct mail or local event marketing as well. Encourage customers (current and potential) to Like you on Facebook or follow CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Signup Today for the Boston SEO Training Class
Are you a marketing professional, website developer or designer, or local business owner in the Boston, MA area looking to learn more about SEO? Register today for the Boston SEO class on February 22, 2012 with Nick Stamoulis, President of Boston SEO firm Brick Marketing! This all day SEO workshop will teach you the most effective best practice SEO strategies to help increase your rankings and website visitors through onsite optimization and white hat link building. Split into a morning and afternoon session, attendees with work directly with Nick Stamoulis and learn white hat SEO strategies that can be adapted to meet their own online marketing needs and goals. The SEO class is limited to only 10 people per workshop, so don’t delay CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Be Cheap with Your Hosting Company
I had a client whose site went offline for a few days through no fault of their own. They called me one afternoon in a panic, wanting to know if our developer had taken down their site for some reason. I assured them that my in-house developer would never pull a site down for any reason—your website is your business and your livelihood! As a business owner, I understand the damage that can be inflicted from having your site offline for a few hours; a few days can be disastrous! It turned out my client’s hosting company (a cheap, overseas service) had suspended their site for what remains an unknown reason. It took days of phone calls and emails before we finally got in touch CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Can Inbound Marketing Make Your Brand Better?
The days of Mad Men marketing are long over. Whether you are ready to admit it or not, very few consumers want to listen to your marketing messages when you are ready to sell. These days, active consumers have taken the buying process into their hands, using search engines, peer review sites, blogs and social networking sites to create their own buying experience based on what they need when they want it. When you want to sell doesn’t really matter, it only matters when they are ready to buy. That is why it is so important to maintain a consistent online brand presence; you never know when someone might be looking for your company/products. Inbound Marketing in consumer centric. Consumers are looking for a more personalized CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Restructuring Your SEO Link Building Budget
Let’s assume you are entering your second or third year of SEO. You have a well-optimized site, a company blog that posts two new posts a week, a decent social media presence and a solid link portfolio. You might think that you can ride the success of your previous SEO efforts for a few months, or even for most of 2012, but easing off on your SEO means the competition can catch up a lot faster than you realize. Before you know it, your hard earned success might start slipping away! If you are thinking about reeling in your SEO campaign due to budget constraints, restructure the traditional link building budget into content marketing and social media marketing and take a more CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Can PPC Help Your SEO?
For small to mid-sized businesses that don’t have $10k to drop on PPC every month, there is still some search marketing value to be had from launching a PPC campaign, even if you can only spend a minimal amount. In my experience, organic SEO produces much more long-term results than PPC, but certain elements of PPC can actually enhance your SEO. Keyword Research The nice thing about launching a PPC campaign is that you can get a lot of useful data very quickly that can then be applied to your SEO campaigns, including keyword research. Site owners can test the effectiveness of certain keywords with a PPC campaign and then slowly incorporate those new keywords into their SEO. Instead of waiting 3-6 months to find out if CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google’s Algorithm Update Targets Ad Heavy Sites
Just last week, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land reported the latest Google algorithm update which targets ad heavy websites. As Google’s official blog post announcing the page layout algorithm says, the update affects “… sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads. Matt Cutts warned that this update was coming back in November at PubCon. How many ads is too many? As a user, I appreciate Google’s attempt to take on ad heavy sites. It’s annoying to have to dig through a page of ads to find the one snippet of content I am looking for CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Rebuilding a B2B Website? Incorporate SEO Now!
On-site optimization has become more important than ever to capitalize on changing user search behavior and the new search algorithm updates. Aged and established B2B sites that had never done any previous SEO have the luxury of a strong search engine trust factor, something that only time can bring. A little onsite SEO and they see dramatic results relatively quickly. New B2B sites that build SEO right into their web design get off on the right foot and don’t have to worry about scrambling to catch-up down the road. If you’re looking to redesign or re-launch your B2B website, optimize it as you go! Here are 3 benefits of incorporating SEO into the initial design process: Your content is ready to rank. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Common Onsite Enterprise SEO Challenges
While the same white hat SEO guidelines should apply to all websites regardless of size, larger websites (think 1,000+ pages) face a unique set of challenges that smaller website may not have to deal with. Smaller websites are often able to make decisions quickly and act on them ever quicker because they don’t have to worry about these 3 common onsite SEO challenges: Scale The most obvious problem facing many large websites looking to begin their onsite SEO is the sheer size of their website. I can tell you first hand that optimizing a 1,000+ page website is no small feat; the keyword research alone can easily take 40-80 hours of work, while actually optimizing the content (including writing Meta tags, optimizing the URL structure CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Outbound Linking from Your Business Blog
Knowing when and how often you should develop an outbound link from your blog to another site is a tricky thing. No website is an island (that’s why it’s called the World Wide Web), but obviously you don’t want to lose your hard-earned traffic to another site, especially a competitor. The Internet is full of distractions (so many YouTube videos to watch!) and once a visitor leaves your site there is no guarantee they’ll come back. If they get more than a few back clicks away from your blog, you’ve pretty much lost them until they rediscover your blog another day.
So when should you incorporate outbound links?
The most obvious scenario for incorporating an outbound link is when you are citing/quoting
eferencing someone else’s work. For CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Attempting a Guinness Book World Record for Social Media SEO Link Bait
Guest Post Written By Brian Hawkins If you’ve read enough posts here on Search Engine Optimization Journal. You’ll know that there is no silver bullet to high search engine rankings. So if any SEO firm could guarantee top 10 rankings, it’s simply not worth the risk. Which is why Brick Marketing is a huge advocate of quality original content with its SEO infused social media services http://www.brickmarketing.com/social-media-seo-service To prove my point why you should obey Google’s Rules: What would you do if you went to work and noticed that you were no where to be found in the search engines? Plus this was your peak Q4 season that counted for a majority of your ten million dollar plus e-commerce site. Would you start to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
4 Signs You’re Killing Your Company Blog
Business blogging is one of the most valuable marketing tactics a company can employ online. And in light of Google’s recent “freshness update”, having a business blog to drive your SEO is more important than ever. However, running a successful business blog is not as simple as many site owners think. It is a huge time commitment (with no end date) and the potential for taking a wrong turn is very real. Here are 4 things that could end up killing your company blog You can’t get at least one post published each week. Blogs need fresh content in order to survive and help build your online brand. I’d rather one of my SEO clients not even bother with a blog if they can’t commit 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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