Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization houston’

SEM Strategy: Don’t pick a bad (SEO) apple.

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

If you are a new, small business and lack the connections to acquire help with your search engine marketing strategy, then it may seem like you are completely out in the wild when it comes to finding and selecting a decent search engine optimizing and web marketing expert.

Finding the right search engine marketer on a budget can be a challenge, but it is entirely possible if you have a clear picture of your online business’ needs. You cannot expect to find a SEO person who understands your business more completely than you, and when you seek one, you simply cannot expect them to “social media” you into complete success unless you provide the guidance. Even if you don’t have the “know how” you need a very clear end goal in your mind before you try and find someone to help you get there.

If you do not have a clear picture of the path you want to take to raise your online business’ Internet ranking, try to think of it as something you would do in traditional marketing to raise awareness of your business. If that does not work, then when you are speaking with your prospective web marketing or SEM person, then you should ask them how they would achieve the online business marketing goal you’ve set.

A good search engine marketing person can give you some kind of a rough strategy without making too many promises on time. An even better search engine marketer will also tell you whether your goal is reasonable, and help you create a working strategy.

SEM Strategy: Are you reporting your discoveries? (Part 2)

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Once you’ve created that skeleton report of your online business and its general health, you should flesh it out with a secondary report outlining your goals, what metrics you will be tracking for success and how you intend to achieve these goals. We recommend creating these types of SEO analytics reports twice a year, so that if some goals aren’t achieved, you can explain how, and take enough time with your final report to reflect the actual findings and what they mean for the online business.

For your personal information, you should keep an Excel document outlining how your online business is doing on a weekly, or monthly, basis. Regardless of whether you share these results or not, it will give you a realistic picture of your Internet business marketing strategy. If it’s going right, you will have a clear track to success, and it will make your final report a lot easier to put together. If it is not heading in the right direction, you know to change tracks, update your final report to reflect this decision, and produce winning results.

It also allows you to have the necessary information about your website business in “real time,” if the online business’ owner asks for an update at any given moment. Don’t go overboard with this, though, or the numbers will drive you crazy; once a week is plenty.

SEM Strategy: Are you on schedule?

Friday, February 18th, 2011

Even though we’re fairly proficient at the balancing act of an aggressive blog posting schedule, keyword research, homepage management and other tasks associated with being a SEO and social media person, search engine marketing can be a little tricky if you’re doing snatches of it here and there without any kind of schedule. Proper SEO strategy for the best kind of search engine marketing results involves creating, and sticking to, an editorial calendar. Otherwise, the best you can hope for is sluggish growth of Internet rankings.

The reality is, without a good editorial calendar for maintaining the web marketing strategy for your Internet business, these vital updates will fall by the wayside in all of the day-to-day minutia. If you cannot hire a dedicated SEO or SEM person to do the job, then it’s even more important to figure out what the shortlist of search engine optimization tasks are for your website.

So here’s the process, in three steps: 1) Figure out the tasks. 2) Prioritize the tasks. 3) Schedule and implement.

If you miss one day of your planned schedule, it’s usually not a big deal if you have dedicated time to making up for that lost day, but if you find yourself constantly missing SEO deadlines and failing to optimize your content or update the site in a timely fashion, then you’ve either got the problem of an overly-aggressive editorial calendar…or too many things on your plate. It is important to the future of your business to create the web development calender, so don’t slack. As soon as you have a website, make sure you take the necessary steps to grow it!

SEO Strategy: White hat v. black hat (Part 2)

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Continuing from our last post about white hat SEO technique is this little number about black hat search engine optimization. In search engine optimization terminology, black hat is the “dark side,” of SEO, using techniques outside of the recommended “best practices” of white hat techniques.

Although it may seem like sound search engine marketing strategy to focus solely on gaining rankings through manipulating the search engine crawlers, it is a very short-term and short-sighted way to build your website rankings. Black hat SEO tactics do not obey search engine rules, and typically involve techniques like keyword stuffing, invisible text and doorway pages. Another popular black hat tactic is spamdexing, or, spamming the search engine indexes with keyphrases that make the website content seem relevant to the machine.

You’ve seen spam pages before; they’re all links and flashing lights with no genuine content or navigability, and nothing that would draw a human user to the site. They may even trick you into clicking on other links with pop ups, videos and sound files. Generally speaking, there’s no known purpose to the website. The more your website business looks like a spambot, the more likely it is to get banned by the search engines, and associate your name online with spam. If you are trying to build a genuine online business reputation, these fast and illegal techniques will not do, but if you’re in search engine marketing and looking for a place to dump links and get click-throughs, then you might find yourself on the dark side.

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