Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘online business marketing’

SEM Strategy: Engaging your audience

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

At some point in search engine marketing for any online business marketing venture, you will need to take a look at what is in the website and fix up its content. Many companies, in an effort to engage their audiences and increase brand awareness, are taking a more journalistic approach to creating web content.

Your website business shouldn’t be some kind of a boring repository of links and link-farming attempts, because this isn’t much better than a spam website. If you’re paying for the web space, especially, there is a chance to improve your online business’ brand awareness with SEO; incorporating those buzzword keywords, and getting some social media engagement, too.

One way for a SEM to consider audience engagement, once he/she has figured out the general demographics of the audience, is to imagine reciting items on the website physically to a potential customer. If it falls flat when you say it out loud, chances are, it’s not going to do much for improving your website business, or encouraging potential customers to click around.

Your online business’ SEO and SEM successes depend entirely on engagement; if the audience isn’t “feeling it,” then your website will start circling the drain in your niche market. Provide interesting stories with your web content, colorful images, and give you audience a feel for what your brand is about. Take your message to social media and interact with people, too, so your audience gets a sense that there are actual people doing this, and you will successfully engage your audience.

SEM Strategy: Networking—go outside and play

Monday, May 9th, 2011

One way to guarantee your online business grows in recognition online is not to just have your search engine marketing people sit around and optimize all day long, believe it or not.

While it is important to work on the SEO metrics and other numbers for your website, you need to spend some time networking. Online networking for your business is fine, but nothing beats face-time.

We recommend finding the community gatherings you can take business cards and flyers to, along with local, national and international conferences, webinars, events and socializing activities to meet peers in your industry. You should also do something similar for the target groups of people you want coming to your online business. For example, if your store was a knitting/sewing store, you would definitely benefit by networking with other knitting and sewing businesses for how to establish your brand, but you’d benefit the MOST from finding the local chapter of “Stitch N’Bitch” and convincing that group to come buy their yarn from your company.

Where do you find these people? Some of it is good old-fashioned investigative marketing work, making phone calls to local schools, religious organizations and businesses to see where your target audience goes. The other part is going online and finding these people in social media networking situations, Meetups and other online communities. While your SEM should focus on optimizing your page for your target audience, do not forget to go find them, and draw them in to your site.

SEM Strategy: Your true organic search results on Google

Monday, April 25th, 2011

While using Google Analytics to determine the strength of your search engine marketing campaign, your SEM experts want to pay close attention to the organic search results. The things to pay the most attention to are the top organic (non-paid) keywords driving traffic to your site.

Google Analytics has a lovely set of tools to monitor your current organic keywords, as well as the functionality to help you find similar or better keywords to improve your SEO Internet ranking. The first place you want to start your SEO analytics is with the “Content overview” report, typically located in the bottom right of the main reports page.

From this page you can scan everything from your landing pages’ entrance keywords to the top landing pages on your site. What you can do from here, is make sure your organic keywords match the landing pages they’re supposedly coming from. If they don’t, then there’s a strong possibility your bounce rates are incredibly high.

If you have a landing page full of outbound links, then you should monitor those click paths, and see if any of the organic search terms embedded in the alt text of those links ranked on their initial landing page. If they did, you might want to consider moving those ranking keywords to your anchor text, where they would better serve your web content.

SEM Strategy: Are you Tweeting?

Friday, April 15th, 2011

One of the “fun” jobs of a search engine marketing expert is social media. The social networking platform is a free and easy way for most online businesses to gain brand awareness and make connections with a diverse platform of related niche markets. One of the instantly successful ways, currently, to communicate your website business’ news online is through the social media platform Twitter.

For search engine marketers, Twitter isn’t just a valuable tool for promoting, but an effective way to see the latest trends in social media, and SEO. Some of the top minds in search engine marketing use Twitter, and at this time, are still actively engaging their audiences through meaningful, targeted information and posts. Some of these are easily recognized, like SEOMoz, and Search Engine Land, but the others are personal accounts like Matt Cutts’ (@mattcutts)—he’s the head of Google’s anti-spam team, or Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan)—who is the former head of Search Engine Watch, and the current co-founder of Search Engine Land, which are both excellent sources of information for SEMs beginning to learn the landscape of the web optimization industry.

Another point to note, as a website promotion tool, Twitter is currently one of the most popular of the social media platforms out there. Since it commands a large audience and is popular, your website should absolutely be on there as a way of growing its brand awareness. Twitter has its own internal search engine, and the more your posts are listed, the better chance you have of growing your organic search outside of Twitter as you gain followers and recognition.

SEO Strategy: Are your links rich with diversity?

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Like a healthy ecosystem needs many different habitats in order to thrive, your online business website needs a diverse array of links to maintain healthy organic search and Internet ranking results.

Although link building may seem like a vast and endless ocean of blogs, directories, social media, forums and more, there is no shortcut to finding the online platforms and places that will benefit your website business. In other words, your search engine marketing person’s online business strategy in this case is to sit down and do some actual research. Fortunately, instead of making a huge list of every website business or organization that pings on your SEO analytics, then working your way down that humongous list, the better search engine marketing strategy is to use a virtual watering hose approach, instead of a watering can.

What we mean is, when it comes to diverse link building, you don’t have to get every single person on your list, but, like Noah’s Ark, you should try to get at least one or two of every type of link relationship that would benefit your online business’ marketing strategy. This benefits your organic search results too, because search engines can find you in more places if you’ve stretched your social network out to them.

For best practice SEO results, try and accomplish 15 to 20 link building activities in a month. This can mean anything from picking a few relevant blogs and commenting on them, participating in a few forums, submitting articles to a few publications. The trick is to cultivate a few favorite of each type and take the time to participate in each of them. The diversity doesn’t just help your online business’ organic ranking, but it keeps you from getting incredibly bored while you increase your website’s good online reputation.

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