Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘SEO INFORMATION’

SEM Strategy: Where is your traffic hiding? Part 2-What’re you looking at? No really, what?

Friday, February 11th, 2011

Another fantastic way to draw viewers into your website, (apart from our favorite—slick, keyword-rich and optimized content) is by showing them, instead of telling them about your online business. Internet marketing is a tough sell, especially if you’ve got a niche market where your competitors have figured out how to use social media and SEO analytics to make their pages shine.

Images, then, are a way to stand out against your website business competition in the land of search engine marketing and SEO strategy. There are a few good ways images can help bolster your Internet business and help gain ranking online. First—it’s a great place to put some keyword-rich alt text that your visually-impaired customers can see, and the search engines can index. Second, it helps break up long batches of web content.

Even though we love to read, it’s hard staring at a screen of text. No matter what your website business is about, you need to either keep your text brief, or break up the long paragraphs with something relevant and pretty to look at. A third point in favor of using images as part of your search engine optimizing and website marketing strategy is that your images can also be ranked by search engine crawlers. This adds to your website business’ net Internet rankings with relatively little work.

The number one tip for using images as part of your SEM or SEO strategy—USE GOOD QUALITY IMAGES! Choose high-quality, glossy images that have been taken under appropriate lighting, Make sure to use an SEO naming convention, tag the picture correctly and use keyword-rich alt text to describe the image and you’ll be set!

SEO Strategy: Where is that traffic hiding? Part 1- Be the king of your domain(s)

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Unless you want to jump right into search engine marketing and buy PPC advertisements to route traffic, you should consider looking for those hidden cache’s of traffic lurking around the Internet. One thing you have to be absolutely sure of, especially if you’re a new online business, is that you or your SEO specialists are using “white hat” techniques to improve your Internet ranking. We discussed white hat SEO and SEM techniques in an earlier post, so you should be aware of how that works.

Our personal recommendation for website businesses is to go the white hat route to avoid being flagged as a spambot, and to establish the same online business reputation as your physical business/product would have. In the range of allowable (and recommended) white hat techniques for finding hidden caches of website traffic are strategies like searching for and registering domain names that relate to your website.

Be the king of your domains! Find out all of the keyword variations on the spelling, misspelled versions, and look for what’s available with your name—.orgs, .coms…you name it. What it boils down to, as an SEO strategy is, if it could possibly, conceivably, even remotely, be construed as your website, head over to GoDaddy, buy it up and redirect it or link it to your actual web business. Otherwise, someone else will buy it and potentially charge you a lot of money to buy back your own name.

SEM Strategy: H is for HTML—It Makes Your Website Work.

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

As a business owner, your primary responsibility is to keep your business up and running while paying attention to your overhead and your profits versus losses. Unfortunately, you also need to know a tiny bit about HTML in order to make sure your online business strategy is working correctly. Total ignorance of the Internet will not work in your favor, so you either have to hire an extremely competent webmaster to help work on your search engine marketing strategy, or you have to pick up a little of the slack and learn about the inner workings of a website.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. One of the easiest places online to learn about HTML is online. For easy-to-understand tutorials created by developers, go to a place like to learn how to build a website for yourself. There’s a number of tools, articles, and guides to play around with and learn various aspects of HTML, XML and CSS. Understandably, you may not become a master developer, but at least you won’t get taken around the block when it comes to all of the fancy lingo.

SEM Strategy: G is for Google—Are You Google-ing?

Monday, January 10th, 2011

If you are a small business, or a business that isn’t 100% about your search engine marketing strategy, then you should start out with Google’s SEO and SEM tools for analytics and web business optimization. There are at least 10 free Google tools you should be using that work on everything from keyword ranking and optimization to Internet ranking.

We’ve sung the praises of Google for small businesses getting their Internet business marketing strategy together before, and will most likely continue doing so until another company does as much comprehensive work to bring free SEO analytics and other vital Internet ranking and develop statistics to your online business marketing. The 10 tools to have, or consider before you buy something are: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Google, Zeitgeist, Google Trends, Google Insight for Search, Google Traffic Estimator, Google Keyword Tool, Google Search Based Keyword Tool, and Google Ad Planner.

Each of these web analytics tools addresses a specific need for your website business to succeed. Unlike paid tools, Google does not give you 100% accuracy, but it does a fine job (for free) of letting you know the lay of the land with your online business marketing progress. Another aspect of using Google’s tools for your search engine marketing, at least in the United States, is its clout as the biggest (least evil, or so they say) search engine on the block. If you follow their guidelines, you can get a lot of mileage out of your search engine optimizing while your online business has its SEO training wheels on. If you haven’t yet, go and Google yourself—pronto!

SEM Strategy: D is for Development—So, How’s That Website Coming Along?

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Along with everything else you need to remember or create for a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy is a thorough plan of development. This differs slightly from the goals of search engine optimization in that development is about the direction of the entire website, from design to content.

Your SEO strategy deals primarily with content creation, placement, and getting the web design organized and accessible, making it more of a maintenance project. With development, you are looking at your online businesses potential to grow in its market, and how you want the website to mature, at least from the highest level. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty details, you look at the efforts your Internet business has, and, after you’ve broken down the processes, figure out how you want each of them to grow and change.

The purpose of outlining a development plan for your website is to have some kind of a goal to keep your search engine marketing and online business marketing strategies fresh, or at least, have some kind of a benchmark of your website’s progress. Otherwise, your Internet ranking will tank as your page stagnates.

All the SEO and SEM strategy in the world can’t save a website that hasn’t aggressively developed its image to continue to appeal to its intended audience. It’s the first month of the year, so we’re basically suggesting all of the essential housekeeping projects your website business needs to cultivate in order to compete online. Get cracking!

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