Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘wesite content’

SEO Strategy: Keyword Targeting; the Plural Twist

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

When you’re optimizing the keyword content for your title tags, you’ll eventually come across some keyword phrases that should be singular and plural. So, how do you capture that organic search ranking without coming up with the most clunky and awkward title tags?

Easy—get organized, and get creative.

We get pretty excited about Excel sheets around here, because of how neatly they organize your search engine marketing strategy into pretty little columns and rows. This is no exception. When it comes to those SEO keywords, they’d better be going into a continuously updated spreadsheet, along with other useful metrics like how they’re ranking, and whether they’ve been tweaked.

So, the first step to making title tags that include singular and plurals is to identify which keywords would actually make viable plurals.

Then you get creative, and make the page title work as part of your website design. Luckily, there’s a formula for that.

Say you were optimizing for the keywords [outdoor figurines] and [outdoor figurine]. Combine them creatively using your company name, or other weighted keywords in your bank. If you sold outdoor and gardening items, you could ostensibly turn this SEO keyphrase into this working title tag: <insert your company name here> Figurine: Outdoor Garden Figurines.

If your company sold tools, you would have the words [tool] and [tools] to use. So you could potentially make a title tag that went Tools: <insert another optimized keyword here> Tools.

Creatively incorporate your plurals in the same title tag by separating them with other keywords, and devices that make it look less awkward. This will help your Internet marketing stats, without making your website look foolish.

Got it? Good. Now get to work.

SEM Strategy: When Did That SEO Go Live, Again?

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

Even if you are a mom and pop shop, if your company intends to increase its online business presence, you will need to devote some time to SEO, and a lot of time to search engine marketing.

Since running a business, let alone a website, is time consuming, you might be tempted to add a little website design time here, and a little keywording there. Unfortunately, unless you put your search engine optimization on a schedule, your SEM strategy will never develop fully, and your Internet business will never garner the organic search traffic it could potentially hit.

There are three major reasons to plan a SEO Schedule. First, you need to have the web content published and ready to go. It takes anywhere from 30 to 50 days at the most before content begins to show any Internet ranking. Second, you have to have enough content ready to replace and recycle as you need fresh material for your website content. And third, you need to maximize the search engine optimization value of your SEM campaign, and have something ready to follow it.

This is important for seasonal content, and you can always plan between social and evergreen content strategy by monitoring your website’s SEM cycles on tools like Google Analytics, or other forecasting tools. Ideally, you want enough content to coast your website through its peak times, so you can focus on the website marketing, link building, and social media networking aspects of growing your online business.

SEM Strategy: Search Toolbars & Utilities

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

As your online business puts together its search engine marketing strategy, you should take some time to consider the search toolbars and utilities that makes your users’ online experiences more tailored and functional. Here’s a quick and dirty rundown of the most popular toolbars out there, and how they might influence searchers looking for your Internet business’ products or services.

Google: Google’s Deskbar and Toolbar respectively allow users to search Google in Windows Taskbar, and through a special toolbar that stores cached copies of pages, finds pages similar to the ones being used, and finally, it shows the website’s “PageRank” Internet ranking.

AOL: This toolbar is optimized for AOL users and allows them to access their mailboxes, chat and other specialized features. It also accesses the AOL search engine.

MSN: As part of Microsoft’s services, the MSN Toolbar is run by Silverlight, which allows for a streaming drop down channel of MSN web content, which runs a live search engine optimized feed of content so the users do not have to move away from the website they are currently using.

Yahoo/Bing: Optimized search engine toolbar that feed to their search engines, and allow access to the Yahoo/Bing mail and chat options. They are also one of Google’s most serious competing search engines.

All of these toolbars work for Internet Explorer and Firefox, so, if you’ve got users that rely on their toolbars for news and searches, you should start considering how to tweak your search engine marketing strategy to fit

SEO/SEM Strategy: Part 1—3 Tips for Planning Ahead for Better Search

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

There are only a handful of days before New Year’s Day rolls around; do you have your Internet marketing business strategy in place?

Although search engine marketing might seem like it’s all about implementing a system, and tweaking it until you hit the sweet spot of keyword phrases, search engine optimizing and organic traffic results, it’s actually a lot more vicious. If you do not implement the right search engine optimization strategy for your online business, organic and paid search results are going to your search engine marketing team will have to tear down anything you’ve done and start from scratch.

This is an absolutely preventable waste of time, money and resources. So, if you’re floundering about at the end of the year and wondering what your website business marketing team can do to plan ahead—read on.

Plan ahead to improve your Internet ranking’s organic search traffic and paid search results by learn the ins and outs of reporting. If you do not know the total revenue or acquisitions your Internet business has gained from search—find out. You should know what conversion windows are of utmost importance to your search engine marketing team, and whether you can expand beyond that window to include other metrics that improve how you optimize your website design and content.

Another thing to consider with your reporting is your micro conversions. They may be small, but they can be mighty, so track these little suckers. They could be anything as simple as someone signing up for your newsletter, social media or e-mail, but not making a “purchase” on your website business. Down the line, they are more likely to turn into a profit than a complete stranger to your website.

SEO Strategy: The Over-Optimized Trap

Monday, November 29th, 2010

In search engine marketing land, optimization and keyword phrases are like music to our ears, but in our eagerness to show you how to wrangle this whole search engine optimization beast, we forget that there are some very apt pupils among you folk who might go for the extra credit and over-optimize your website businesses.

You’re probably thinking, if a little optimization is good, then a LOT of search engine optimization is better, right?

Unfortunately, there are three main ways to ruin your page’s chance of gaining Internet rankings through over-optimizing your website content.

The first is with duplicating your keywords, title and H1 tags throughout your online business. Yes, it is important to have keyword rich content in these areas, and to use the keyword phrases you are ranking best on, but, you need to have unique content for each of these areas. Otherwise, you run the risk of having too much identical content, which will reduce your overall organic search results, and possibly get you labeled as a spambot by the search engine crawlers.

The second way to reduce your Internet business’ organic search traffic is with bad internal linking. Basically, if you have too many non-contextual internal links in your site, (anything more than 10) you are risking over-saturation of your most popular links at the cost of the rest of your website.

Finally, the last and most tricky piece of over-optimization is the text-to-picture ratio. If you have a website business that is largely graphic, with very little emphasis placed on the text, it might be bothersome to your visitors, who have to scroll, or click to find the information they are looking for. If they text isn’t written well, either, it can be a huge issue, because it is basically killing the optimization on your website by guaranteeing a large bounce rate from irate readers.

Connecting Buyers With Sellers On The Internet