Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

SEM Strategy: Budgeting for PPC—Background (Part 1/2)

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

As your online business grows, you will eventually want to gain higher Internet ranking results than organic search can produce. When this happens, you will probably turn to pay-per-click advertising, and bidding on some excellent, optimized keywords in your niche industry.

Paid search is very much a part of traditional search engine marketing strategy; it’s the online version of buying a billboard on a highway, or a 30 second radio advertisement on a popular station. Most SEMs should dabble in a little keyword bidding and be aware of what PPC involves. Generally, it helps to go through Google’s AdWords tutorials to figure out a good starting point for your campaigns, and to see whether it is even worth it for your online business to start a PPC campaign. It really depends on your competition, and if there is a clear advantage in purchasing keywords to start outranking them in the search results.

Apart from Google AdWords, if your company uses a search engine marketing agency, they should have some tools they are familiar with, or at the very least, should have some kind of a SEM strategy for creating successful PPC campaigns.

One final tip for familiarizing yourself with PPC campaigns and how you can apply pay-per-click advertising to your online business website, Google “Perry Marshall X10 Seminar” in Google videos, and watch the tutorials.

SEM Strategy: Scheduling for success

Friday, May 13th, 2011

There are two habits, that may sound like the easiest thing, ever, but they are very possibly the most important things a search engine marketing expert needs to learn. These habits? Organization and scheduling.

A SEO schedule for an online business is vital to making sure the website marketing strategy stays on course, and being organized helps most search engine marketing people by allowing them to figure out the most optimized schedule for updating things like social media, keywords, blogs, and web design. It also creates a good routine for responding to comments, participating in forums and generally, working on increasing brand awareness in an efficient fashion.

There are tools to help any SEM get more organized. Everything from syncing calendars on a smartphone, to acquiring social media scheduling tools like TweetDeck can help cut down the amount of work you need to do in order to stay on top of the SEO trends. Think of it this way—if you don’t schedule some time to jot down the progress of your SEO analytics, then it might get done, possibly, but there’s no guarantee. The analytics lets you know how well keywords are performing, and whether your changes are impacting the bounce rates and click-through rates. You could potentially drive your website business into the ground, just by overlooking this one, fairly boring task.

Similarly, as more SEM “chores” get added, it turns into a juggling contest. The better you can juggle, the more you can accomplish in terms of increasing your website’s Internet ranking. Otherwise, you’ll just be treading water and keeping up with yesterday.

SEM Strategy: RFPs—Are you asking the right questions? (Part 6)

Friday, May 6th, 2011

Our final post in this series on RFPs deals with the one last detail you need to “bother” your prospective search engine marketing firm about—data.

When it comes time for reporting, you will ideally want to see a variety of reports on your SEO metrics, and it is up to your SEM agency to have the flexibility in their data reporting to get you those numbers.

First thing to ask is if they could generate a report for you in an hour. Bear in mind, if they answer that question too hastily, they might be pulling your leg, so delve a little deeper into this point by asking them if they can pull a variety of reports like “I want to see data analysis by sub-category, keyword and landing page,” (or some other SEO metric) can you have those reports put together and presentable in an hour? You might get a clearer response with that.

And, like other parts of your SEM, you want to know who is handling the data analysis of your account. If they’re outsourcing this information, then you may want to reconsider, because, again, a third party is handling your information, and may lack the intimate knowledge of your account to provide an accurate report. While you might not think it’s a big deal to have a different team handle these numbers, it makes a huge difference if the analytics team doesn’t know the direction your search engine marketing account is heading, what keywords are being promoted, etc.

It may seem like an extremely long list of requirements for your prospective search agency to meet, but as an online business establishing brand awareness for your website, you can’t trust your reputation with some fly-by-night SEM establishment.

SEM Strategy: RFPs—Asking the right questions (part 4)

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Today’s post is another that singles out a question you need to ask your prospective search engine marketing firm—we’re talking about keywords.

As the fodder for brilliant, optimized web content, keywords are still king, or at least, a very important player in the royal court of SEM. In asking your search firm about building a list of those SEO keywords, you have two points to be 100% crystal clear about, before contracting with them.

Point #1- Who builds the keyword bank? If you’re doing the job yourself, then there’s a strong chance this company is a waste of your money. After all, they’re supposed to know which keywords will increase your organic search results, and help boost your Internet ranking. If they say yes (and many of them will) there’s the sad fact that they might not do a great job of curating the list, or even building it in the first place. So, to gauge their strength and dedication to your keyword bank, you should follow this important point with the next one…

Point #2- How is this initial list generated? If they have software, fancy “solutions packages” and anything that does NOT sound like, “we have someone, probably an intern, create the list and then one of us approves it,” then you are getting hosed, to put it mildly. Machines, while efficient, cannot do the job of a human, so if they don’t have their lists created by people, you should be a little concerned.

Finally, before you go signing any contracts, you should ask them for a concrete answer about their keyword building and list curating strategy. Once a list is built, it should be updated, based on the type of company and the amount of web traffic. You should ask them how often they maintain and update their lists, and see if they actually have a reasoning for their timeline.

SEO for Long-Term Success; Patience is THE Virtue

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

As you build and tend the search engine optimization campaign of your website, the keyword to keep in mind is PATIENCE. This, and steady work are what will gain your website a steady climb in PageRank.

Once your page has had excellent keyphase research, optimization, and content, and is ready to generate organic traffic on its own, you should start working on building those high-quality links. This process can be slow, but worth it, because an overly aggressive link-building web campaign could get you penalized by Google for link baiting.

While you work on link building project, another long-term goal for continued optimization maintenance on your page is to winnow down your keywords, key terms and key phrases from long-tail keywords to specific, targeted ones that will gain you a lot of juicy link juice (e.g. “red Nike running shoes” then “Nike running shoes” then “Nike shoes”).

Keep researching for a diverse range of keywords, links and ways to change your optimization and web marketing strategy to keep up with how Google changes its algorithms. It’s good to keep a few extra keywords and terms in a spreadsheet on the off chance you realize your original strategy is starting to devalue in SEO rankings.

You should also consider building landing pages for targeted keywords; even if it’s a matter of throwing in a couple of optimized internal links and then coming back to fill in the content and other SEO stuff later. It keeps you competitive, at the very least, and keeps your search engine optimizers and web solutions experts busy!

Don’t forget to continue tracking and tweaking your original keywords and phrases, because you will need to keep tuning your website to match Google’s algorithms and stay competitive.

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