Is it Time to Ditch Your SEO Partner?
Choosing which SEO firm, consultant or expert to outsource your website’s SEO campaign to is a big decision. You might look at a dozen potential SEO partners before you decide which one is right for you. But working with an SEO company is not like getting married; you don’t have to tough it out for better or for worse. If six months into the relationship you notice that things aren’t progressing as smoothly as you had imagined, it might be time to ditch your SEO partner. Here are 3 signs that it’s time to look for greener pastures: You’re constantly chasing them down. I take pride in my customer service and do my best to get back to my SEO and consulting clients as quickly as possible. I think that customer service is an important component of the SEO client-provider relationship, and I don’t take that responsibility lightly. As an SEO client, you deserve to work with a nice company! Your SEO partner should actually be your partner and you shouldn’t have to spend two weeks, a dozen emails, five phone calls and a smoke signal to get a hold of someone when you have a question. It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. Some CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Why Should You Conduct a Full Link Audit?
Once I year, I have to prepare myself for the arduous process of running a full link audit on my site. Is it fun? Not by any stretch of the imagination, but it is very important nonetheless and helps shape my link building campaign for the coming year. Conducting a full link audit on all of my sites (including my company site and external blogs) is a very time consuming process, but it’s imperative that it gets done. The same is true for you and your websites. Why should you bother with a full link audit? First off, conducting a full link audit means that not only do I gather the data on how many links my sites have, but I also visit each and every CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Optimizing Your Website for Local Search
Many businesses and websites aren’t looking to dominate the national search results; they just care about doing well in their own neighborhood. For instance, a plumbing company in Phoenix, Arizona doesn’t want to get visitors to their site from Normal, Illinois, so ranking well for national keywords isn’t the primary objective. Even though that visitor is looking for a plumber (which you might assume makes them part of the plumber’s target audience) that Illinois homeowner isn’t going to hire an Arizona based plumber. This is why it is so important for local businesses to incorporate local SEO best practice guidelines into their onsite optimization process. Here are 3 best tips for optimizing your website for local search: Localize your keywords. Localizing your keywords CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Organize Your Blog Commenting Activities – SEO Video Tip
It's incredibly important to organize your monthly blog commenting activities for multiple reasons. First and foremost, you don't want to have multiple people from your company commenting on the same posts each month, especially if they have differing opinions! Secondly, you want to create a schedule of quality, related blogs that you know are frequently updated so you don't have to waste time searching for a new blog to comment on. Watch this week's SEO video lesson here! For more link building video tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing link building video lesson archive . CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Social Media and Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is comprised of three main online marketing tactics—SEO, content marketing and social media marketing. While each of these three campaigns can be very successful on its own, when the three are properly integrated the results for your website and brand can be remarkable. Internet marketing is not a one-or-the-other kind of battle. The most successful websites understand how to leverage all their online assets to their benefit, including social media marketing. By now, most businesses realize the importance of having some level of a social presence. Social media have even bled into traditional advertising, with television commercials ending by asking viewers to like them on Facebook or find them on Twitter. From Fortune 100 global brands to the mom-and-pop pizza joint around the corner, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What’s New in SEO for January 3, 2012
We have compiled the latest news and updates from the big three, Google, Bing and Yahoo as it relates to SEO and the search engines overall. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH GOOGLE: What were we watching this year? Let’s rewind 2011. Google takes a look back at the most popular videos and channels of 2011. On your mark, get set, GOMC! Registration for the 2012 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC), which is a global online marketing competition open to professors and their students, is now open. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH BING: New Year, New Destinations: Win a Trip-of-a-Lifetime with Bing and Lonely Planet Bing asks, if you could take a trip anywhere in the world, where would you go? So there you have it, the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Common B2B SEO Mistakes
It’s very easy to make small mistakes with your company’s B2B SEO campaign that can have lingering effects on its long term success. Many B2B companies don’t even realize they are making these simple mistakes and can’t understand why their SEO campaign is under-delivering on their expectations. If your B2B SEO campaign seems to be suffering, double check that you aren’t accidentally making these 3 SEO mistakes before deciding to chuck your campaign. 1. Relying too heavily on industry jargon for your main keywords. This is a common SEO problem in many B2B industries, especially for tech or software companies. You might rely too heavily on industry specific keywords (like “contact reasoning engine”) that don’t mean anything to your target audience. Instead of “contact reasoning engine,” they CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
4 Ways to Repackage Your Content
The number one complaint/concern I hear from my SEO clients when it comes to content marketing is that they don’t know what to write about. The number two complaint/concern is, even if they do have a list of topics ready to go, no one on their staff has the time to commit to a heavy content marketing campaign. To both of those I say, “Oh yes you do!” Content marketing isn’t nearly as hard as most site owners think it is, even if looking at a 6 month editorial calendar can be a little intimidating. An easy to solution to your content marketing woes is content recycling. Content recycling (or repackaging) is when you take a piece of content, say CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Ocean Marketing’s Shady SEO Practices Exposed
First off, I’d like to thank everyone who brought this situation to my attention. Without your comments and emails I might have never realized that I was one of the bloggers that Ocean Marketing was blatantly plagiarizing from. Just yesterday a reader sent me this link from Reddit about a company called Ocean Marketing, with a note saying they thought one of the company’s blog posts looked suspiciously like a post from this blog. I pulled up the two posts side by side. Search Engine Optimization Journal: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing? Ocean Marketing Blog: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing? Even with just a quick glance it’s pretty obvious that their post CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Blog Posts to Read for December 29, 2011
Below you will find our favorite blog posts that are related to SEO, search engine marketing and social media marketing from this past week. Please feel free to visit each, we hope you find them as helpful as we do! How To Decide If You Or Your Business Should Use Twitter [Infographic] This post includes an infographic to help you determine how you are going to use Twitter or if you should stay clear. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE How to Attract Readers and Search Engines to Your Blog This post includes tips for improving your blog’s appeal and making the most of your blog. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE Nobody Wants a Website Websites shouldn’t be built for businesses; they should be built for the customer. CLICK CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Local Event Marketing Helps Your Link Building
Brick Marketing is a proud sponsor of the Boston SEO Meetup, a local Meetup event for SEO and SEM professionals, other marketing professionals and local business owners interested in learning more about SEO. We attend every month’s event and use the time to network, build our local brand, come up with new blog post topics and yes, even get links from the event! When I say that everything you do to promote your business, both online and off, can be leveraged for SEO, I mean it! Even local event marketing can help your SEO and link building. Most of the business owners that attend the SEO Meetup aren’t looking to hire an SEO firm to handle their SEO or link building. If they are attending the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
3 Ways to Make Your Blog More SEO Friendly
A business blog can rank in the search engines for branded searches alongside your company website and social profiles, while individual blog posts can rank extremely well for long-tail keywords. All of this helps build your overall online brand. However, in order for your blog to help your SEO, you need to take the time to properly optimize each post, just like you’ve optimized each page of your website. Here are 3 tips to make your blog more SEO friendly: Optimize the entire post. You want your blog posts to rank well for related searches. In order for it to rank well, you have to optimize your individual blog posts just like you would a page of your company’s website. Once you’ve written your post, determine what keyword CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What’s New in SEO for December 27, 2011
We have compiled the latest news and updates from the big three, Google, Bing and Yahoo as it relates to SEO and the search engines overall. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH GOOGLE: Rich Snippet Instructional Videos Google has put together a series of tutorial videos to help get you started or fine tune your rich snippets which provide you with the ability to help Google highlight aspects of your page. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH YAHOO: Yahoo! Opens Content Analysis Technology to all Developers Yahoo! has opened up its content analysis technology to the world to help developers build their own fantastic experiences for their sites and users. WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK WITH BING: Out with the Old, In with the New: Bing Takes Stock of 2011 and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
A Few Thoughts About Reputation Management
Reputation management is fickle thing. Sometimes it’s a simple process of identifying where a brand went wrong, backtracking and fixing the situation, then carrying on in the right direction. Depending on how well a company had been handling the situation, it’s a relatively straightforward campaign. Other times, a company has been in denial of their situation for so long that they can no longer tell up from down. Those reputation management cases require a lot more work to make headway. Here are a few of my thoughts about reputation management: What’s wrong with your organization? Why are you getting so much negative feedback from your customers? One or two angry customers are normal (and to be expected). You can’t be 100% perfect 100% of CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Don’t Stuff Your Website Like a Stocking
In my opinion, on site optimization should be the first phase in any SEO campaign. What is the point of building great inbound links if your site isn’t ready to convert visitors? A sloppy navigation structure, weak content and limited call-to-actions aren’t going to help your online business grow, not matter how good your offsite link building is. With Christmas just 48 hours away, I thought I’d bring up the flipside of failing to optimize your website—over optimization. And the easiest way to over optimize your website is to stuff it full of keywords, as if you were stuffing a Christmas stocking. It makes sense in theory; if the search spiders look for specific keywords to determine what a website page 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
Connect with Nick Stamoulis
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
