Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING HOUSTON’

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: 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.

SEO Strategy: When to Get an In-House Search Engine Marketing Team

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

If your company is small, you cannot, most likely, afford an in-house search engine optimization team, or a few search engine marketing experts hanging about making your website profitable. The fact is, most small business don’t place much of an importance on their website analytics or website performance simply because there’s not enough money for it, and nowhere near enough time.

For the small business, the best route is to use as many of the free optimization tools on the market, and as soon as it’s feasible, hire an agency to handle search engine issues, web marketing strategies and everything else that requires a web solutions expert. Marginalizing your website in the age of the Internet is just a waste of a valuable resource.

If your company is mid-sized to large, then you most likely have already hired SEM and SEO agencies to polish up your web marketing, and have a host of search engine optimization and web solutions experts to draw from. But is that enough? For you, the issue really isn’t the price, but the quality of service. So when do you hire an in-house search engine marketing person or team?

The answer: When the agency cannot provide you the immediate support you need. An in-house expert is not only available immediately, but is working 100% on your project, can train your entire team on best practices and push your ROIs to the next level of optimized results.

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: Top factors for rank

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

When you are optimizing your online business website for Internet ranking, there are a few factors you need to pay close attention to for better ranking. According to SEOMoz, of the the top search engine optimization companies today, there are top ranking factors to consider. Here are the best of the bunch. We will follow this up with a post about the top four ways to lose ranking online.

1) Keyword-focused anchor text- This is the most important factor of a website’s potential to gain Internet ranking. Not only is this how search engine marketing experts build organic traffic, slowly, but this is how the online business builds its visitor loyalty and a dedicated audience.

2) External link- External links are exactly what they sound like, links that point away from your website. These help your ranking in a different way because their results have a good chance of showing up in your website as a search result.

3) Link diversity- For the best SEM results, your online business ideally want link relationships with a diverse set of networks online. This helps boost your business’ popularity across multiple platforms and increases the chances of your brand being recognized.

4) Keyword-focused title tags- The titles and H1 tags are an important part of SEO, and an easy thing to plug in a relevant, optimized keyword that previews what the page will be about.

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