Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Archive for May, 2010

SEO Content: How to Improve Your Blogs

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Chances are if even one English teacher in your past told you that you’re an excellent writer, you probably believe you can write a decent blog post. It is after all, a blog—not rocket science. The reason people are getting paid to blog content for the web, however, is because they aren’t just good writers, but excellent at optimizing content. The thing that separates you from a web solutions expert team’s blogger is their ability to take web analytics and tweak your page performance by juggling around a few key terms and phrases.

Fact: We’ve discussed using images of your product or office to make your content seem more personalized, but there is more to blogging than the obvious.

SEO Tip: Stand out from your competition by utilizing some traditional search optimization used in print media, like pull quotes and interesting graphics or images. If you have unfamiliar terminology in your content, make the keyword a link, either to a directory where you explain the term, or a product of yours that demonstrates the term.

Using pull quotes and other newspaper/magazine-style methods to highlight text in your content is a visual stunt, because it helps draw readers into looking for the quote in your website’s text. As for having live links in your content—rather than have visitors leave your page to go searching for unfamiliar terms, guide them to the information (especially if it’s to websites you have linkbacks with) so they will come back to your page.

Search Engine Marketing SEO: How to Maximize Online Holiday Shopping

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Although the holiday season hasn’t begun yet, your business should start planning for the holiday season and optimizing your website well ahead of schedule. No matter what your industry or product, you can profit from having some solid search engine marketing and web promotion strategies.

Fact: Shopping online for a gift can be incredibly convenient. If your core customers know you will have a special deal or sale for the holidays, you can increase their spending either in-house or online through promoting your sales on multiple forums. Think of it like grocery store sales—if it’s a wine on sale, the wine will be by the cheese section, by the fancy bread and in the wine section too.

SEO Tip: Begin planning for the holiday season two months ahead of time to catch all of the major holidays coming up. Along with traditional search engine optimization investigate using pay per click and multi-channel e-commerce campaigns. You should also try to get some media and customer attention to your company and products with press releases to as many publications as possible, e-mail campaigns and newsletters.

While most of this is familiar terminology, multi-channel e-commerce campaigns might be a new one for your search engine optimization toolkit. Basically, if you have a physical product to sell, you should put it on as many websites as possible, like eBay, Amazon, Overstock and other big web marketing companies. If you cannot manage marketing on multiple e-commerce sites by yourself, consult a web solutions expert for the best way to hit all of the bigger sites, and how to best optimize your search engine marketing strategy to feed back to your main page.

What On-page Elements You Absolutely Need

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

When building your website you should start off on the right foot and build in proper search engine optimization techniques. Today, we’ll give you a quick and dirty list of the on-page elements your website absolutely needs for competitive rankings and perfect optimization.

A Title: <title> Your title here </title> Would you pick up a book without a title? The same “duh” rule applies to a title-less website. It confuses visitors and does not allow your page to be categorized or ranked by search crawlers and spiders.

Keywords Tag: <meta name=”keywords” content=”your keywords here”> This is a common-sense one, but absolutely necessary if you want your search engine optimization to go anywhere. A tip: Do not abuse the keywords tag, however, use words that appear in your content, or are related to your content.

Description Tag: <meta content=”your description here”> While most search engines do not display descriptions all the time—on the off chance one of the smaller engines does show a description tag, it’s nice to have a good write-up handy, especially if it incorporates one or two words of the webpage’s search terms.

Content: Not just good, but excellent, optimized content.

H Tags: <Hx> Your heading here. </Hx> Heading (H) tags, like the title tag, tell search engine what is in your page and allows easier ranking and categorizing. Headings can also break down content in your page. A heading tag can be numbered from 1 to 6 (where we put the x).

Alt Text: <img src=”url” alt=”text where the image is”> Depending on a person’s Internet connection, or visual ability he or she may not be able to look at your images. Instead of a broken link and a blank box showing, put some keyword-rich text to help optimize your site.

Beyond SEO: Are Meta Tags Worth The Effort?

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Although they have been overused and abused, meta tags are still an important part of the search engine optimization process. While certain types of meta tags, like meta equiv=”refresh” are improper usage and worthless for optimizing your website, meta tags like the title are extremely important for your website.

Fact: Even search engines like the great Google use meta tags to help navigate a website. Although it may not significantly contribute to your page rankings, it may increase how optimized your website is, and how much traffic you get.

SEO Tip: Meta tag keywords are still a viable part of the search engine optimizing process. While some of the larger search engine tools like Google and Yahoo may not actually consider the meta tagged keywords, they will use the keywords as a method of cataloging and ranking search results for Web searchers, which makes them a fairly useful piece of search engine optimization. Additionally, just because the big boys like MSN, AOL, Yahoo and Google don’t use meta tags, it doesn’t mean the smaller search engines don’t.

Meta tag keywords, and meta tags in general, should match the overall theme and content of your website, otherwise your website may not achieve the search engine optimization it needed, rather, it will be flagged or penalized for violating the rules like a spammer. A general rule of meta tag thumb—don’t overuse your keywords. Keep your meta tag keyword content to about five words, otherwise you risk being categorized as a spambot.

Link Building for Organic SEO

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Building links is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Natural link building does not increase traffic to your website in one day, but it contributes to your overall organic SEO, and keeps your website healthy and active.

Fact: Natural linking can provide you a sizeable nest egg of traffic that increases over the years. The trick is to create and follow an organized and logical plan to increase your website’s traffic.

SEO Tip: To build solid natural links, you have to spend time investigating and participating in communities of like-minded people. You also have to be an authority in your field, posting interesting content and building your own audience.

It may seem like a catch-22 to need links to gain traffic and to have your own traffic to build links, but it’s really just how you approach search engine optimization. The most important aspect of good website optimizing is having excellent content. Good content brings an interested audience, and gains the attention of competing businesses online. Content, Searchability and Usability will also get the attention of the search engine crawlers.

As you build your website, parlay this attention into good natural link building by establishing real relationships with your competitors and audience online through healthy communication, participating in forums, community webpages and attending real-life networking events. Instead of wasting all of your website optimization time on building low-quality links with limited traffic results, focus energy on establishing concrete, long-term links that can actually profit your business.

Link Building for Organic SEO

Connecting Buyers With Sellers On The Internet