Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Tips for Article Marketing

Online Marketing, SEO, article marketing | One Comment »

The main purpose of online marketing is to drive as much traffic to your site as possible. Providing fantastic content is one of the most effective ways to attract users to your site. Article marketing is an important part of your SEO strategy.

Article marketing is when businesses promote their products and services to their target customers by submitting informative articles to online directories. These online directories usually have a very large user base and also a strong reputation in the online world, so articles published on them bring in a lot of traffic to a site.

How does it work?

Every article published on these online directories contains a resource box which contains the name and contact details of the business, along with a link to its website. Therefore, when someone reads the article, they will see the business information and link, and will hopefully click the link and be directed to the web site. The goal is to bring in customers to increase online sales. In this way, article marketing can achieve the objectives of an online business.

To make article marketing efforts effective, you have to write relevant and user centric articles. In other words, in order to entice the users read your article, it should cater to their area of interest and must present valuable information. If an article is able to do this, the chances of a user visiting the company’s site become much higher.

You also want to create an effective resource box. The resource box is the opportunity for a business to advertise itself effectively. Therefore, the information in it must be made interesting enough to make the readers visit the website. The resource box must be updated regularly to make it further appealing to the readers.

Lastly, it is highly important to write articles using the appropriate keywords. It is wise to undertake keyword research to find the relevant keywords and use them in the right amount.

How to Set Goals for an SEO Strategy

SEO | 0 Comments »

Every web site owner hopes for a large amount of traffic to their site. Whether a new website is launched or an old website is moved to a new domain, the first question that comes to the mind is “How much time will it take to have a reasonable number of visitors to a website?” A good SEO plan involves setting goals which includes an estimated amount of time for a web site to reach a certain amount of traffic. These goals and estimations will determine if your SEO plan is a success.

It is wise to set a realistic time frame for an SEO plan. You may have a lofty outcome in mind, which is fine, but you need to make sure you have a realistic time frame to work with. You need to allow time for any modifications in the strategies if results are not up to the mark without causing any further delay.

It’s also important to set specific and measurable goals. Set goals in quantifiable terms. For example, you want to reach 100 visitors, per day, in 6 months. This is a clear, specific, and measurable goal that will quantify your success. Make sure you are checking your progress regularly to ensure you are on track to reach your goal. If it has been 3 months down the line and you barely have any visitors, you may need to make changes to your plan if you want to reach 100 per day.

There are many issues to factor in when creating your SEO goals. A new web site may take longer time to attract visitors. How much time, effort and money are you willing to put into your SEO efforts? Are you doing it yourself or hiring a team? The keywords you are going after may be more or less competitive than others, which has an impact on your SEO plan. All of those factors should influence your SEO goals and timeframe.

Trends in SEO for 2011

SEO, Social Marketing, internet marketing | 0 Comments »

For the past several months, online marketers have started making predictions about the future of Search Engine Optimization and the trends that will take place in 2011. Now that the year has begun, here are some things that we think will help online marketers make the most of SEO in 2011.

Social media presence – Having your website on social media networks will help improve rankings on Google. If a website has strong presence over social media, it will command high ranking. Thus online marketers need to give high importance to Social Media Optimization.

Twitter is a must – As a means of connecting to the public, Twitter has gained high reputation. It has been observed that Twitter is capable of driving huge traffic. Therefore, marketers must include Twitter while devising SEO strategy.

Coded Facebook pages – With Facebook’s importance growing this year, coded Facebook pages will give your business an edge with an interactive touch, generating leads as well as increasing conversation rate.

Trustbait instead of linkbait – Links coming from independent online sources rather than those links that are contextually linked to a site are better for Search Engines. This refers to Trustbait and is a vital part of online marketing.

SEO to grow more comprehensive – In 2011, the term SEO will need to expand and be more all inclusive.

The demand for SEO will only continue to grow and make the task of online marketers more challenging as well as rewarding.

Guest Blogging to Build Traffic

Blog Marketing, SEO, internet marketing | 0 Comments »

We’ve talked about blogging as a means of traffic building many times.  However, guest blogging can also serve as a great way to generate additional traffic to your site.  Guest blogging is writing and submitting a post that is displayed on someone else’s blog.  Many bloggers use guest bloggers if they are going on vacation or just don’t have time to update their blogs on a regular basis.  Writing for someone else’s blog may seem counterintuitive, but it can actually very beneficial as part of a marketing campaign.  So how can guest blogging improve your Internet marketing results?

Exposure to a new audience – Guest blogging opens you up to a whole new audience of potential customers.  Those who haven’t come across your blog may be reading the blog you are guest posting on, so they’ll get a chance to read your writing and follow links to your site.

Backlinks – Guest bloggers are usually allowed to include a short bio that contains a link to their site.  This can help you to create backlinks, which make it easier for potential customers and the search engine spiders to find your site.

Improved credibility – If another blogger thinks your information is good enough to post on their blog, people may begin to see you as an expert in your field.  This improved credibility can result in more traffic to your site and increased inquiries from potential customers.

If you don’t feel like writing a guest blog post for someone else’s blog, send us an e-mail.  Our bloggers can develop a high quality post that you can use to reap the benefits of guest blogging.

Consistent Link Structure and SEO Success

SEO | 0 Comments »

When you’re optimizing your site for the search engines, little SEO techniques matter just as much as the major techniques.  One good example of a simple technique that can work wonders for your PageRank and search engine rankings is the use of a consistent link structure for all of the pages on your site.  If you had your site designed by someone who is not an SEO expert, or you designed it yourself, it may be suffering from inconsistent link structure.  When you link from one page on your site to another page on your site, the search engines follow those links, which can help to get your pages indexed and improve your overall rankings.  However, you need to be careful that your links to a page are always structured in the same way.  If you have two or more link structures leading to the same page on your site, the search engine spiders actually read them as links to different pages.  This can have an impact on how well your site is ranked and how many people are exposed to your marketing message.  Here’s an example of inconsistent link structure:

Sally has a Web site about soy candles, and wants to create links to the page for her soy candle products.  On some pages, her link is to http://www.candles.com/soy-candle-products.html.  One other pages, her links point to http://candles.com/soy-candle-products.  These are two different links, and the search engine spiders will read them accordingly.  Sally should pick one of those links and make sure every page of her site uses the same format to point to the page for soy candle products.

How can you avoid this mistake?  If you don’t have a Web site yet, have one designed by a company with design and SEO experts available.  These experts can work together to ensure that your site design is eye-catching and visually appealing, while an SEO expert can guide the designer in creating a site that will be ideal for SEO purposes.  Taz Solutions has both Web designers and graphic designers on staff, and we can help you build an SEO-friendly Web site from scratch or from an existing site.

Optimizing E-Commerce Sites

SEO, link building | 0 Comments »

Optimizing e-commerce sites is thought to be difficult because the content may be constantly changing.   Products go out of stock or they are discontinued by their manufacturers, so product pages may be deleted.  This means that pages that were already ranked by the search engines have now disappeared and that new pages will have to wait their turn to be indexed.  However, there are some techniques that can be used to successfully optimize e-commerce sites.

Keyword Optimization

Keywords are very important when you’re trying to get a site ranked well with the search engines.  Choose keywords that have too much competition and you’re fighting a losing battle.  Once you have chosen keywords, apply them to your page titles, meta description, and page content.  Properly optimizing your pages with keywords can help you improve your rankings.

Unique Content

Unique content is a must for any site, but it may be difficult to decide how to use content on an e-commerce site.  Your site may currently have many product pages that have very few words of text on them.  What you can do is add relevant content to each page to attract the search engine spiders and make the pages more user friendly.  The content can be in the form of articles, product reviews, or user guides.  For example, a product page focusing on a diamond bracelet could include an article about choosing a diamond bracelet or caring for a diamond bracelet.  This makes your site more useful for readers and it also adds content that can be indexed by the search engines.

Linking

Links are very important for good search engine rankings.  E-commerce site owners can use linking in several ways.  Internal links can point visitors from one page of your site to several others.  For example, a product page may have four or five links to similar product pages.  E-commerce business owners may also choose to take advantage of one-way linking and two-way linking.  One-way linking is when a site links to your site without asking for a link in return.  These are the most valuable links in the eyes of the search engines.  Two-way linking is when you link to someone else’s site and they link to your site in return.  All of these types of linking can help the search engine spiders find your pages and help you improve your ranking.