Local SEO Tips
If you sell a service or product online you may not want to ignore the potential customers right in your own backyard. There are a number of potential local clients who may be interested in what you have to offer, and as more and more people are using the internet for local searches you’ll want to make sure your website is optimized to attract these local clients.
One way to attract more search engine visitors locally is to use local keywords when optimizing your site. For example, if you offer web design services in Texas, research keywords and include keywords with your location when optimizing your pages.
Local Search Results
You should also submit your site for free local search engine listings. There are several local ones to choose from but Google and Yahoo are the two most important. When you submit your site you can add details about your business including your address, office hours and so on. You can also grab a link to a map of your location which you can place on your website.
When targeting local clients, placing your local address, phone number and a link to a Google map of your business at the very bottom of the page footer may help in your local search engine results.
Local city business directories can also be a good source of leads and traffic, but make sure you research the directory to see if it will actually produce results for you. There are many online business directories and you’ll want to choose one with a good reputation and which can produce results.
Don’t stop there however; remember to include your website address on your business cards and local mailings so that local customers can view your website at their convenience. With many local business owners yet to get into the online marketing game, by starting early you’ll stand out from your local competitors.
If you haven’t the time nor the inclination to perform your own local search engine optimization perhaps you should consider using a local seo services company to help you.
Linking Building and SEO
Link building or obtaining quality, relevant, one-way back links to your website is an important part of search engine optimization. Here we’ll discuss 3 aspects of links – linking, deep linking, and back links.
Linking is simply adding a hypertext link that leads from one website to another website. When we link out to other sites, we’re showing people that these sites should be seen, or that we may recommend them.
If you’re getting links from other websites back to your site, this is referred to as back linking.
Deep linking is linking to a page that’s deeper within your website. Your home page would not be considered a deep link. A page such as an individual blog post, or a page other than the homepage of your site would be considered a deep link. For example, “http://www.yoursite.com/blog/link-building-is-necessary” is a deep link.
In SEO, back links are critical in helping you increase your websites visibility in the search engines. When you work to acquire links for your website, it’s referred to as link building. Make no mistake about it, obtaining links is extremely important, and people are paid good money to provide a link building service!
When it comes to building your back links however, there are a few things to remember. First, you want to build as many quality, relevant, incoming links as possible. Don’t waste your time on junk sites, or sites that are considered “bad sites”. An example of a bad site is a link farm, or a gambling or porn website.
Another important thing to remember when building links is to obtain as many back links that are relevant to your site as possible. That means trying to stay on the same topic. If your site is about motorcycles, links coming from baseball sites aren’t relevant. The more incoming relevant, quality links you have, the better your website will rank in the search engines.
If you have the ability to request how a site links to you, suggest that the anchor text coming to your site matches your primary keyword that you’re wanting to rank for. Another thing you might want to suggest is that they link using a deep link. Remember, a deep link is a link deeper than your home page. This is seen as desirable.
When it comes to SEO, link building is a must!
If you’re searching for a Professional SEO Services company to help you with your link building campaign please contact us and lets work together to your success.
A Competitive Analysis of Your Competition
A great way to help create a competitive edge for your business, website, or marketing endeavor is to perform a competitive analysis on your competition. Finding a winning strategy without looking to see what your competition is doing, is going to find you frustrated and struggling to keep up while they’re forging ahead and past you. This is a key point to consider regarding any marketing idea you might have.
A few years back competitive analysis wasn’t part of the existing SEO strategy, but today it’s one of the biggest pieces of information utilized to create a custom plan for SEO dominance. Search Engine Optimization is like a chess game where you need to see two moves ahead before implementing all the parts of your unique plan of action.
Through this type of research you can see what kind of back links, behaviors, and competitive metrics your competition is using to scale their online presence. You can then use that information to go head to head with them or simply surpass them with your own strategy.
Building a good search engine optimization strategy takes time and careful planning. You could go with a random SEO company or consultant and they can do minor changes to your website, but that’s not going to give you the edge for long. You need a long lasting, consistently changing strategy that fits in line with the changes in web 2.0 and beyond.
You can even use the data from your competitive analysis to identify weak areas in your own business model. You can understand with a fuller scope why customers are choosing your competitors over you. You can then mend the bridge between you and your potential customers and create a positive stream to gain the upper hand over your rivals.
Beyond simply emulating what your competition is doing, you should embrace new technologies as they become popular so that you’re building a nice target audience for your brand’s message and style.
This means that you’ll have to utilize growing trends like social networking, internet marketing, keyword discovery, mobile technology, and other methods to make sure you’re on par with the current trends and not get left behind.
This can be done by web savvy business owners, but many choose to go with an SEO firm or a professional SEO consultant to do these things for them. If you already have an SEO consultant and they’re not looking into this or discussing it with you, you might want to go with another company.
Building Your Keyword Lists
In order to rank well in the search engines you must learn to master keyword research and build your keyword lists. Why? Because it will determine the profitability and competition of your market.
If you choose to forego keyword research you could end up doing a lot of work for nothing. There are some markets that are simply not worth pursuing and you certainly don’t want to waste time chasing a market that isn’t profitable.
Steps To Building Your Keyword Lists
Step One: Understand Your Target Audience
Try to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. As a business owner you’re also a problem solver so think about what problems your audience needs solutions to. How would they phrase what they’re looking for? What questions would they ask?
Step Two: Understand the buying habits of your target audience
It’s common knowledge that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. Knowing what keywords to use that will entice your audience to buy will add to your bottom line. For instance, if your website is about coffee then an emotional buyer may be interested in the “best flavored coffee” or the “most popular coffee”. They wouldn’t necessarily be interested in the benefits of coffee.
Step Three: Start with Broad Search Terms
Begin your research with a broad list of keywords centered around your topic. However, make sure they’re specific enough to fit your target audience. What you’re wanting to accomplish is a close match between your visitor’s intent and what you’re offering.
Note: Getting traffic costs money. Instead of concentrating on quantity, think quality. Just getting a visitor to your site doesn’t mean that visitor will buy.
Step Four: Prioritize Your Keywords Based on Conversion
If you can’t acquire conversion data, you’ll have to make an educated guess as to which search terms you think will convert best.
Here are some points to consider:
1. Don’t try to hide what you’re trying to sell. Customer’s today are savvy enough to recognize shady salesmen. Keep your products or services intentions clear.
2. If you use a keyword phrase such as ‘brown coach handbag’, make sure your visitors can purchase ‘brown coach handbags’ at your site. It’s even better if you can link to a page within your site about ‘brown coach handbags’.
3. Does your product present value? If not, figure out how to make it do so.
4. An important factor to consider is the amount of traffic your keywords may generate. Make sure your hosting company can handle higher traffic counts in the event your site gets flooded with visitors. You don’t want your first impression to be that of a website that crashes more often than not.
5. Consider the probability of conversions. If you’re in a highly niched market and know exactly what keywords or keyword phrases your target audience is searching for, then use those highly niched keywords.
If you don’t know what your probability of conversions will be then you’ll need to track this metric. There are many analytic tools available to track this information, just make sure you use the best one for your needs.
Now get out there and take control of your traffic. Get ranked on the first page of the search engines for those keywords and/or keyword phrases that are the most profitable for your business.
Why Perform Keyword Research?
Keyword Research is one of the most important steps in the SEO process but yet, it often gets overlooked. In order to drive traffic to your site you need to rank high for keywords that get searched for. To be more specific, in order to drive targeted traffic to your site you need to rank high for keywords specific to your market, that get searched for. A number one rank on Google does you absolutely no good if you’re using a keyword that no one searches for.
The Benefits of Keyword Research
Why is proper keyword research important? Here are seven benefits of the power of keyword research:
1. It drives targeted traffic to your site; just by simply using the words your target audience uses in their searches.
2. It helps you write more effective sales copy for your website; knowing what terms to include in your copy helps your target audiences identify with you more easily.
3. It helps with content development; it helps you create content that your target audience needs and also helps you avoid wasting your time on irrelevant topics.
4. It helps you understand your target audience better: you’ll know precisely how and what your target audience is searching for.
5. It helps you measure the size of your market: by identifying the number of searches, you can then target vast areas of untapped potential and avoid weak markets.
6. It helps you develop and diversify revenue streams: by using keyword research to identify and employ popular keywords, it might inspire you to create new product and service ideas.
7. In a nutshell: the results of proper keyword research are that your website copy, business strategies, and online marketing will be successful a greater majority of the time.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to conducting keyword research is ourselves. As authorities in our field we tend to think we know what our audience wants and is searching for. It’s a common mistake made by many professionals. After performing proper keyword research I think you’ll be surprised at just what your audience actually searches for.
Start conducting keyword research and get your keyword list built today. It’s one of the best things you can do toward building your online empire.
Social Media Marketing For Your Business
For business owners, connecting with your customers is a priority. However in our modern times, that can be somewhat of a challenge. Creating a sense of connection that can only be brought through long steady partnerships with customers is tougher in the modern age.
Customers seem to connect more with people online in a greater capacity than ever before. This is something that businesses need to flow with and isolate, meaning that main street brick and mortar stores as well as online only companies need to launch strategic social media marketing plans to connect with fans new and old.
Social media marketing is a lot different than traditional marketing efforts. The main difference is that you’re not creating ads or sales copy to promote your business; you’re promoting yourself and the business as an entity that can be sociable. Creating a sense of familiarity with potential customers is the name of the game here, and seeking customers through social media is a double-edged sword in the wrong hands. There are companies that can help you manage your online persona, but only you can add that personal flare and touch.
There are some precautions to take regarding this type of marketing. Web users can spot a phony and a spam artist. It’s easy to get into a mindset where you’re constantly linking people to your site, to your goods, and your website instead of forging ahead and bridging the gap of community and being sociable.
While it might work initially to send links to your new audience, they’ll soon become blind to this. It’s more important to connect over what some managers might think frivolous, than to continually promote yourself and your business with every post or comment. Creating a sense of belonging to your audience and giving back in terms of sincerity will help you get a jump on your competition and engage new and old customers alike.
Social media marketing is not always something that you’re directly involved with. For instance, you could utilize review sites for your website and promote them at your business. Your customers can go to a site and write positive or negative reviews about your business and create a word of mouth buzz that was traditionally done face to face.
This is important because keeping tabs on what your customers critiques are may make your business that much more compatible with the general public. Without knowing how your customers really feel, you might never know why your business is not garnering much attention.
If you’re not on board with web 2.0 and the latest social media marketing efforts, your business might not survive the internet boom. In larger cities, marketing of this type could mean the difference between success and failure. Creating a sense of belonging for potential and existing customers should be your new goal.
If you don’t have time to do it yourself, you can get a professional SEO consultant to assist you with the management of this sort of marketing, and make sure you’re moving forward even when you’re at your busiest.
Steps To A Better Link Building Campaign
There are several steps that you can take towards creating a more effective link building campaign. They involve several key points and upon completion, have shown a track record of increasing traffic and rankings in search engines. You can implement these steps yourself or you can hire a professional SEO consultant, without much cost and relatively few problems.
If you’ve been looking for some tips to get you moving along the way, here are a few tactics to look into.
First and foremost you should have a clear strategy. It begins simply by using a keyword research tool to choose and target specific keywords that are relevant to your site. You build on that and target group keywords for specific market niche’s that relate to your website or business.
Once you’ve established a main group, refine the keywords to specific targeted niches so that you only have the best, most searched words to move forward with in your link building campaign.
The second major step in regard to managing your link building campaign is targeting websites, articles, or forums that are directly related to the keywords that you’ve targeted. This seems like an easy step, but some sites require constant contact and reminders to put the link live on their site. Other companies make you go through a PR firm or company to even be considered.
This is where a good SEO consultant can help. They take the grunt work away from you so that you can concentrate on building your business. Meanwhile, they stay in touch with these sites to make sure that your link is placed in a timely fashion.
The third major step is to make friends. Not just friends but networking helpers, to build a list of link prospects. This means you have to go to forums, and online communities, as well as find relevant blogs in order to increase the amount of back links to your site.
You’ll have to make sure you’re supportive of others and make sure you’re name is out there in the community and niche you’re pursuing. Without this key you may not be able to get the results you’re wanting from your link building campaign.
Content Development Tips
It’s often stated in the world of search engine optimization that ‘Content is King’. The truth is, while it isn’t the most important aspect of your SEO efforts, content development does play a crucial role.
Visitors will stay at your site longer and convert more often if they can identify with the message you’re trying to convey. They come to your website looking for answers to their problems and your content should provide the solution they’re looking for.
It does you absolutely no good to incorporate animated flash presentations or lots of color into your site if your content is subpar. When developing your website or when posting content, always consider your visitors first and the search engines second.
Content development isn’t brain surgery but it does take an innovative, creative person to create content that will grab a visitor’s attention and compel them to want to stay on your site. If you’re considering creating your own content for your website instead of using a professional SEO consultant here are a few tips to keep in mind.
- Your content must be unique. It’s unprofessional to copy content from another website and place it on yours. You should always avoid having duplicate content on your site. If you’re unsure whether your content is unique or not you can use Copyscape to verify it before publishing it to your site.
- It should be relevant to the theme of your site. Whatever the topic is of your website or page should be the focus of your content, as well as your chosen keywords. ‘Nuff said.
- Consider keyword density. The ratio of your keywords, or keyword phrases, to the overall amount of text should be as optimal as possible. Most experts agree that an optimal range is between 1% to 7%. Don’t overuse your keywords or the search engines may consider it as spam and penalize your ranking.
- Use your keywords, or keyword phrase, in the title, meta description, alt tags (words that describe your images), header tags, and in the main text of your page.
- Concentrate on optimizing for one keyword, or keyword phrase per page. I’m of the opinion that it’s easier to optimize for one keyword per page than for several. While it is possible to optimize for more than one, it’s also more work. Let experience be your guide.
In conclusion, optimizing your website with relevant, unique content as well as strong keywords and proper keyword density will drastically improve your search engine rankings, and in turn, visitors to your site.
