Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

SEM Strategy: S is for SEO Copywriting & Content (Our Favorite)

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

We’ve said it before, and because it’s our favorite of the SEO and SEM strategies we’ll continue to say it—when it comes to excellent search engine marketing strategy, nothing tops good, optimized content. Search engine marketing is built on good SEO analytics, and search engine optimization is based on finding the best keywords for your niche online market, and building valuable connections through excellent web content.

SEO copywriting can be done by experienced freelancers or members of your search engine marketing team. Ideally, they should know how to attract your target audience and have a concrete understanding of the keywording you want to see in the online business marketing for your website. You can add valuable Internet ranking points to your website through writing a content-rich and optimized blog for your website, linking to other related blogging sites to your niche market and creating reciprocal links with other relevant Internet marketing blog sites.

Additionally, you should have a website that is easy to navigate with good SEO content in the title, alt and H1 tags, and on the landing pages. Strong copywriting is part of the process of creating an easily understood site map, and increases the overall strength of your website performance and organic search results.

SEM Strategy: L is for Linkbuilding—A Marketing Necessity

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Linkbuilding is a staple of the search engine marketing process for any online website interested in acquiring more of its target audience through networking. It’s the website equivalent of being at a party and mingling with all of the guests. Sure, some of them might not have anything in common with you, but they might introduce you to the people who do.

While the basic approach of linkbuilding is similar to the traditional marketing strategy of networking, we spoke with Peter from NearbyGamers for three ways he gets RPG, wargames and board game players to link to his site.

His first recommendation was to find the associations and groups related to your website business or product. NG: “Find [the] associations related to your project. On NearbyGamers, I find forums for people who play niche games—if the admin posts a link on the forum, not only do I get most of the forum immediately signing up to NearbyGamers, but many of those people tweet and write blog posts linking to it…find the social drivers for your niche industry and introduce your online business to them.”

The second tip is one of our personal favorites—content. Provide web content of value people will use and talk about. Put your keyword research to good use here, and optimize the content for your target audience. NG: “…intro-level is better, because people write more posts for beginners than experts.”

Finally, and this is for people who utilize linkbait like Internet blogs; find a blog or blog community where people respond with blog posts, rather than simple comments. The reason? NG: “The last two weeks at NearbyGamers there has been a dozen heavily-linked posts, after a rant about the definition of ‘software craftsmanship,” because the community is full of self-promoters with blogs who all wanted to throw in their two cents.” Create the mutually beneficial relationship, and let the linkbuilding party begin.

SEO Strategy: Branding Your Property

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

As your website business takes off and you begin to optimize keywords that are associated with your company, you should immediately consider branding your property. Any keyphrases, catchphrases, or optimized website content you have, you should own the rights to. Otherwise, someone will steal your intellectual property and possibly sue you for your own keywords.

When it comes to domain names and other such ventures, you want to make sure you own every disambiguation of your keywords, so when you decide you need to use something for a SEO blog, or if you want to redirect misspelled links back to your homepage, you OWN the link to redirect.

Branded keywords, in particular, are the golden goose for your website. With their high values and conversion rates, you want to make sure nobody else has as good of a chance as you do to rank higher on the Internet.

Register your domain names, copyright optimized catch phrases that are affiliated with your online business, and maintain a competitive edge with SEO blogs, aggressive search engine marketing strategies and rigorous brand awareness to ensure you are well-recognized in your niche demographic.

SEO Strategy: A Few Examples of SEO & SEM Tools

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

As we’d mentioned about A/B testing, search engine optimizers can’t get by with guesswork or intuition. For the best web analysis and website performance enhancements, optimizers need guidance and feedback to find best-practice processes to improve the functionality of our websites (and businesses).

We’ve put together a short list of useful tools for SEO & SEM processes. This isn’t the end-all-be-all list, mind you, but to keep your website performance healthy, you should have tools similar to this.

Google AdPreview- First off, as a budget-conscious search engine optimization expert, you should have Google EVERYTHING. Why? Because unless the other search engines step up their game, Google runs the show. That being said, AdPreview is a great tool to preview what a PPC advertisement looks like before it “goes live.” It also has a nifty feature that allows you to change your geographic location to preview what the ad would look like locally or otherwise.

Another bit of Google you should have in your arsenal is Google Sets. It generates related keyword ideas based on a handful of keywords and key phrases you enter. Why WOULDN’T you get this optimizing tool? It’s FREE.

SEO Digger- This is a nice little tool that builds reverse indexes. What does that mean? It shows which search queries your business is ranking in the top 20 Google results. This has a bonus of showing you key phrases you might not have thought of or optimized for originally.

SEO Book/SEOMoz Plug-ins- Among other things, these plug-ins are boss for showing you metrics on how you are ranking for SERPs on Google. SEOMoz has a great blogging community ready and willing to help you in your search engine marketing, web design, and performance improvement projects!

You should also keep an eye out for a tool that checks for keyword misspellings, so your internal search is optimized. We don’t have a favorite just yet, but it’s worth an honorable mention.

SEO for E-Commerce, Part 3: Do This, Not That

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Continuing our epic tour du force of e-commerce search engine optimization and website marketing strategy, here is the third part of what not to do and what to do instead.

  1. DO NOT: Have weak internal links. Site nav links are weak, uninformative and kinda awful in terms of website optimization. Instead, in a paragraph of keyword-rich text describing something like a category or product, anchor a link to some text.
  2. DO: Hide your session IDs in URLs: Search engine spiders will store them, and then re-store a different session and then possibly flag you for duplicate content. Not to go all Star Trek on you, but there are ethical cloaking devices for URLs. Use them!
  3. DO NOT: Forget to create a content feed: You can submit it to all of the content aggregators out there and pick up some great free backlinks to your product pages.
  4. DO: Tag your products: It’s the age of Facebook, where you can tag just about everything! If you let customers tag your products with their own keywords, you may just find your competitive search engine terminology research does itself!
  5. DO NOT: Have generic page names: A Googlebot, or search spider would learn a lot more from a descriptive and keyword rich file name, instead of something generic like a string of random numbers. If you can make your page names keywords, do it immediately.

10.  DO NOT: Stuff Keywords, anywhere. It’ll get you labeled as a spambot. Stuffing keywords in the navigation just look tacky and very web 2.0. Be cool and use anchor text instead.

And finally….

11.  DO NOT: Use generic text like “View” or “See More”: Instead, describe what is being viewed and what they can see more of. Those terms, by themselves are vague. You can do better than that, because YOU can optimize it with a keyword.

Connecting Buyers With Sellers On The Internet