I frequently rant on Internet marketing and some of the gurus who try to bend your ear. Why? Because many of these so-called gurus trash everything that makes sense in this Internet world, especially when they realize that they cannot make money from the techniques being recommended.
I don’t preach marketing concepts solely for the purpose of selling my products and services. (If you happen to buy my products or services, then awesome, but that is not my point when I share information from my SEO and other marketing campaigns.) I preach the concepts that I have used for myself successfully. Either you can trust me and test the things I recommend, or you can listen to the gurus and drown yourself in pity, when you realize you are not finding the success you seek.
How do you know if your SEO is working? Here are five stages outlined below to give you a better idea and measure the results.
It doesn’t matter if you call it Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or any other fancy acronym, what matters are results. Fortunately results are quantitative and measurable so you can deduce which tactics are effective and which are a waste of time.Relevance is a moving target, it is completely molded by the individual referencing the query, which means that positioning relies a great deal on your ability to read the market and forecast trends and buzzwords with traffic attached. Aside from picking keywords, writing content and building links, you need to know which guideposts to assess to determine if your optimization is falling on deaf ears or in fact pulling its own weight.
So, you are the marketing manager of your firm, and you’ve finally decided to pull the trigger and hire the search engine optimization company that you’ve been talking to for months. The budget has been cleared, the SEO firm is ready to start, and it should be just a matter of time before you start seeing a huge uptick in business. Right?
Not so fast.
An experienced search engine optimization company will tell you that an ill-planned campaign can be a non-starter from day one. This usually happens when there is no clear understanding of what will be required of the client to make the project run smoothly.
Links… aren’t we all a little tired about hearing about links? Don’t link to bad neighbourhoods, don’t link to link farms… don’t get links from bad neighbourhoods; don’t get links from link farms. Don’t buy links. Don’t sell links. Don’t have too many links on one page. Don’t let all the links pointing to your website have the same anchor text.
MySpace is a social media that was established originally for people to interact and socialize with one another. Now, MySpace is partially filled with spammers and half clothed people. Whether one likes that or not is up for debate.
In the online business community the debate is whether or not one should use MySpace for promoting an online business. There is one extreme or the other. Some people believe that one should not promote an online business at all. In fact, they are of the mind frame that MySpace should be a social media and that is it. However, the other side argues that social media is a place where people should be able to share all aspects of their life, including business.
There are many companies on the Internet, who are promising that if you give them lots of money, they will guarantee you top rankings in the search engines. Buyer Beware!!!
Let Me Cut To The Chase
We all want to be on page one of Google’s search engine results (SERPs). After all, the higher our websites rank in Google, the more money we will make. Every single one of us who have built commercial websites are looking to make money and perhaps even to get rich doing whatever it is we do at our websites.
Picture this … you’re ranking really well for an important keyword(s). It’s driving a lot of traffic and life is pretty good.
You decide it’s time to take better advantage of that traffic by giving your site a face lift.
The next thing you know, you’ve fallen out of the SERPS and you’re left shaking your head, not quite knowing what happened.
It’s an all too common scenario. To us Marketing People it was just a “face lift” a “re-skin”. We didn’t really make any major changes that should matter to the search engines.
No reason to let our SEO team know in advance that we’re making these changes. After all, it’s still the same site. or is it? Google doesn’t think so.
While creating a website can either be a simple or complex procedure it is always advised that you start simple and add on from there. Once you have a basic design it is a lot easier to add in advanced functionality.Create a standard design that runs through the website, this is usually done by using base templates or include files. The search engines will read each file once per visit. What this does mean is that once the bot has cached the file it won’t need to reload it each time it views a page. More importantly this will also prevent these lines of code being replicated and taking up a good percentage of unique content on each page. Although it is now suggested that the major search engines can now recognise boilerplate content and filter it out for the most part.CSS while being valuable to human visitors as it quickly styles a page with quicker load speeds this advantage can also be carried over to the bots. It has long been speculated that the quicker a page loads the more likely the bot is to continue indexing your website. It would almost seem that a time limit is posed on each visit, the more pages the bot can index in that time frame, the better for the site.
Were you aware that search engine spiders love fresh content and the more frequently you update your content the more frequently spiders traverse your site?
The advantage of adding fresh content frequently directly impacts your topical site synergy. By creating islands of topical (related) information on a subject provides each page with an opportunity to pull its own weight and rank on its own constitution as a contributing factor to your traffic and exposure.
Without updating your content, or having aged content on your site that could benefit from a content and link audit you are implying to search engines that proper on page factors are not a top priority.
I started submitting press releases in the 80s when I was a college student to help promote one of the many activities I coordinated as the vice president of service for a national service fraternity to which I belonged. Since that time, and especially since the advent of Internet marketing, the philosophy behind the strategy of submitting press releases and measuring the success of a release has completely shifted. The number of clippings from newspapers running your release used to be considered the hallmark in determining the success of a release. That’s no longer the case.
In today’s marketing environment, submitting press releases online is a very viable strategy for attracting attention to your website and to your business. However, the strategy is very underutilized by online service businesses. Why? Because most of us are still operating under the rules of traditional press releases. Many of the traditional rules of writing press releases no longer apply in today’s Internet marketing age.
SPN Advocate Corner
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I frequently rant on Internet marketing and some of the gurus who try to bend your ear. Why? Because many of these so-called gurus trash everything that makes sense in this Internet world, especially when they realize that they cannot make money from the techniques being recommended.
