Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘website analytics’

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: 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: Q is for Query Refinement—What Are They Looking For?

Monday, January 24th, 2011

There’s Google Instant and Yahoo Rich Search Assist (you think they would have found a better name for it, being a search refinement and all) as of the end of 2010, but what is query refinement, and how does it help the search engine marketer?

The second part is a maybe. As for the first, have you noticed recently as you’re typing a question in either Google or Yahoo’s search engine boxes, a half page of suggestions crop up? Or, if you misspell a keyword in your search term, many search engines show a message like “do you mean ___” underneath the search bar.
As a search engine optimization or search engine marketing person, query refinement can help your website if you’ve got your SEO analytics up to date. It also helps your online business by guessing what your target audience is looking for, once they’ve entered the keywords relevant to your website business, and clicked on your page to find the information/product/service they need. Regardless, it re-emphasizes the need for best practice SEO and SEM with your Internet business website.

Unless something changes, or you happen to have an incredible experienced SEM expert, there isn’t much you can do to affect the query refinement process. What you can do to help your website business is follow a well-thought-out SEO strategy of researching the best keywords and key phrases for your niche industry, aggressively seeking out ways to build your online business reputation (through search engine marketing and traditional marketing tactics), and putting up fresh, valuable content that the search engine crawlers will pick up.

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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