Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘SEM HOUSTON’

SEM Strategy: Do you translate well?

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Although most Internet marketing websites are fairly cut and dry, there are some nitty-gritty little specifics that you should pay some attention to, based on your target demographic.

For example, Google Chrome has a feature that allows pages to be translated to the “native” language of the browser. Even if your website business is in Houston, Texas, if your target demographic is Chinese, and has their web browsers set to Chinese as the default language, your page might wind up looking one of those older dubbed Kung-Fu/Ninja movies. You know the type—with the awful voice overs that you know have nothing to do with the scene. Your website appearance could be the visual version of a badly-dubbed Kung-Fu/Ninja movie, if you’re not careful about your audience.

While language is something you want to make sure your page addresses, another important piece to consider is the visual appeal. The web design may look like gold in Google Chrome, but might wind up having strange symbols and extra code pop up in an older version of Internet Explorer.

When analyzing your target demographic, be sure to gather as much information about the people who are loyal to your online business, and plan your web design accordingly. Do they require, for example, larger fonts, more contrast to see your products or services easily? What types of browsers are they using, and what Internet speed do they have. Yes, some people still use dial-up, does your page load well for a dial-up user?

You can find most of this information in a traditional analytics page like Google Analytics, or whatever website analytics software you use. Once you know the type of user you are working with, you can build a great website business to fit their needs.

SEM Strategy: Scheduling social media

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

In our last post, we mentioned plugin tools for WordPress that allowed the search engine marketer to use their online business blogs more efficiently. We mentioned there are plugins that allow these blogs to be published on many common social media sites without the SEM needing to plug in the information by hand.

In this vein, we should mention the social media tools for scheduling posts, because this is another way for the busy SEO to make sure their web content is getting published on a regular basis, without having to sit in front of Twitter all day long to craft something perfect. Most of the bulk publishing tools have a way to schedule posts well ahead of schedule, which comes in handy for events like if you are live-Tweeting one event, and you have additional content that needs to be posted, and can’t stop the live-Tweeting to post that other web content.

While some people might worry that the content may get too impersonal, we’d recommend thinking about it in terms of crafting the correct message the first time, and then sitting back and thinking about all of that free time you just gained. Yes, it’s worth it.

There are a number of scheduling programs out there that work for publishing to your Twitter page and Facebook fan page, like TweetDeck (owned by Twitter), HootSuite, LaterBro, Sendible, and others we’ve probably missed. In addition to these, are the option to add mobile apps to these tools so you can monitor and edit them from afar. It’s a good idea to read some cNet reviews about each of these platforms, and test drive one that suits your online business the best.

SEM Strategy: How smart is your blog?

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Any online business has tremendous potential for boosting their organic search results, and their SEO Internet rankings by owning and curating a blog that is relevant to the company’s products or services. While blogging is a great social media tool to show a different side of your company, how easy is it for your search engine marketers to use?

In other words, just how smart is your blog?

For blog sites like WordPress, there are new updates rolled out regularly that provide shortcuts and easier ways for bloggers to use the site as a promotion tool. There are some excellent SEO Plugins for WordPress your search engine marketing experts should take full advantage of, to make the job as low-stress as possible.

A few of our favorites are:

    -Meta Robots WordPress plugin, that automatically adds meta tags to posts
    -Sitemap Generator, that automatically builds and generates a HTML sitemap
    -Google (XML) Sitemaps, which builds and pings many sitemap services with an XML file
    -SEO Title Tag, which shows a short, SEO title
    -SEO Slugs, which keeps slugs from becoming too long

There are quite a few more, developed fairly regularly, that may suit your blogging style a little better. These particular tools mentioned are mostly internal tools, to make the blogger’s job easier. There are, of course, social media publishing options that automatically publish your articles to places like Twitter and Facebook, so, once you’ve gathered the necessary internal tools by looking through the WordPress plugin site, you should implement a way to promote your blog posts externally, without having to publish everything by hand.

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.

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.

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