Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimizing houston’

SEM Strategy: What’s your budget?

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

In planning an effective search engine marketing strategy you need to consider your budget for this before you can even start sketching out the web design of your online business. If you want good quality work from a trusted source, you have to rely on search engine optimizers (or agencies) that have excellent recommendations. It is easy to find freelancers in practically every area…from web design to search engine marketing strategy, but unless you are very thorough about reference checks, you might not get what you expected.

Skimping a little on a search engine marketer or a web solutions expert now means months, possibly years of hurt to your website business because it runs the risk of being put together by complete ingénues. Unfortunately, the more years of experience someone has working SEO analytics and understanding the SEM dynamics online…the more it will cost you. If you are a small online business, try to find someone with mid-range experience so you can actually afford them.

If there’s any places you can save, it is with those SEO analytics tools because there are quite a few decent and free ones on the market. If you hit gold a few years after running your website business, then you might want to try out the SEO tools that provide exquisitely detailed information about your target audience.

Remember, once you’ve assigned a budget for web design and SEM, stick to your guns. Once you’ve found your price range, do plenty of competitive shopping to see who will best represent your business online.

SEM Strategy: We’re Skipping Z to Talk About Huffington Post

Monday, February 7th, 2011

To be honest folks, as much as we tried, there just wasn’t anything entertaining enough in the letter “Z” that we could write about with regards to search engine marketing and optimization. We decided to write about the exciting news in the world of SEO and SEM, instead. While everybody was (hopefully) enjoying their Superbowl weekend, AOL was busy buying the Huffington Post for $315 million. From a search engine marketing perspective, this could be an extremely good move for AOL in optimizing revitalizing its brand. It also means there could be an upset in the current order of search engines and social media platforms.

As part of its overall SEO strategy, AOL plans to incorporate its web content sites like the hyperlocal Patch.com, TechCrunch, Engadget and other AOL websites will become a part of the Huffington Post Media Group, with Arianna Huffington as the president and editor-in-chief. Ms. Huffington’s story is a search engine marketing dream. She pioneered the first web-only newspaper publication in 2005, and it quickly became a rockstar online, recently drawing a crowd of around 24 million readers every month (to give you a frame of reference, the New York Times gets around 30 million, according to Advertising Age). Its low-cost content model has approximately 600 posts a day which are produced by 6,000 unpaid bloggers and a paid staff of 88 editors and writers.

Despite initial skepticism, HuffPo’s innovative and strongly opinionated web content gave bloggers a unified place to voice their opinions, and was a game changer for the traditional media outlets; showing them the power of integrating social media with good content and strong editing. We’re very excited to see how the new Huffington Post Media Group is going to challenge Google and Facebook for their established Internet turf.

SEM Strategy: W is for WordPress—A Blogger’s Dream

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

In the world of Internet blogs, WordPress is one of the popular blogging tool that integrates easily into social media platforms, and online business websites. You can link to one, or several blogs from your website and cover different aspects of your Internet business. Additionally you can create fresh web content for your page and figure out how you can use this material to enhance your website performance.

WordPress has been around since the early 2000s, and is an Open Source Project, which means it is being improved and edited by a global community of coders, web designers and developers. Although WordPress started out as a blogging system, it’s evolved to be its own content management system complete with widgets, themes, plugins and anything you (or your back end people) can edit and improve. WordPress is also free to use, which is excellent for website businesses just starting out with their blogs and search engine marketing.

Among its widgets are the social media and social networking tools necessary to promote your website content across multiple platforms, along with the option to link to your website and publish there. If you’re comfortable working with any blogging system, WordPress is fairly easy to use, and should be a priority to consider when you need a place to store extra content, create a new look for your website or promote your thoughts and ideas in a different medium.

SEM Strategy: T is for Title—The First Impression

Friday, January 28th, 2011

On a website, just like a news article or any written document, the title describes what is in the document. One of the easiest things you can do with search engine optimizing your online business is to have unique titles for each of your pages. If necessary, you should also create keyword optimized titles throughout the website content, to help break up the ideas.

Ideal titles are 8-10 words at most, descriptive of the content on the website without being too long. Generally speaking, if you want the titles to help improve website performance, they should be unique, describe the important things on the website and in the best situation, be something used as the link anchor text. Descriptive anchor text increases the chance your link will be clicked on.

In order to write SEO friendly titles, either choose from your bank of researched keywords strongly associated with your Internet marketing business, or select the key phrases, issues and familiar buzzwords surrounding your niche website business that your target audience can strongly associate with. The bonus of using popular buzzwords is you will engage your target audience and compel them to select your link, but your web content should relate to your title, or it will affect your bounce rates negatively.

Like any first impression, a title tag gives strangers an impression of what your online business looks like; be sure to put your best foot forward.

SEM Strategy: R is for Reciprocal & Resource Linking—Networking & Making Friends

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

A reciprocal link happens when two websites link to each other to get traffic. For the online business owner, it is vital to try and make valuable reciprocal links by submitting the website to link exchange directories, and by making contact with related, relevant website businesses.

Once you’ve implemented the SEO strategy to make your website optimized and ready to go, your next step is to start networking online and integrate your website into as many niche markets as possible. Search engines like Google use things like link popularity (the number of links that go to a website and the anchor text of the link) to gauge a website business’ relevancy. From a search engine marketing perspective, it’s a no brainer—reciprocal linking is another part of the winning the online popularity contest for your Internet business.

Resource linking is when you link to websites (without expectations of reciprocity) that have valuable web content that your target audience would find interesting or useful. In terms of the search engine spiders, your website Internet ranking points for having quality links that also pertain to your website business product or service. If you make contact with your resource links they may become reciprocal, but you should closely examine whether this would help your online business website in the long run, or if the resource link is just better off as a hyperlink.

With either form of linking, it is not worth your time to “spam” hundreds of websites in the hopes of gaining links, because if they aren’t relevant to your online business you will be flagged as a spambot and lose the website performance game.

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