Raise your hand and give a shout!

Conversion and visibility…these are two concepts obvious to any web marketing professional.  Your site must be visible, which means optimizing that site to be crawled by search engines (internal links well managed, alt tags on images, a quality page description and title, and of course plenty of content with appropriate keywords leveraged).

However, if your focus is merely on visibility, getting people to your site, you’ll soon realize you’re lacking business.  The second focus must be conversion.  You must be able to get that traffic to your website to convert.  Buying your product, submitting a lead form, or signing up for a newsletter, these are the end you have in mind.  However, again if your sole focus is conversion, you’ll achieve the same end…no business.

You must focus on both.  How do you actually do this?  Simple: raise your hand, and give a shout!

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Focusing on Negativity?

Normally I would say that focusing on negativity is not the way to approach business.  However, depending on your industry, you may not be able to avoid it entirely.  For instance, I work for a company whose business is highly dependent of the reputation in the marketplace.  This makes susceptibility to negativity campaigns very high.  There have been negative “PR” attacks on our company with words such as scam or fraud or other such things.

So, in this kind of business, we cannot simply avoid negativity.  It’s unfortunate, but if it’s avoided entirely, it leaves potential clients thinking what they’re reading is true.  The way to combat this, therefore, is to start optimizing toward negative keywords as well as your “sell-able” keywords.  After a little investigating, I determined one of the best ways of doing this is through a blog. (more…)

What Really Matters?

This was released several months ago, and I tweeted about it at the time. However, I didn’t take the time to post it here and comment on it. SEOMoztakes the time every two years to poll SEO professionals to find out what factors they’re finding to be most important when optimizing a website. What may be surprising to non-marketing professionals is that the “on page optimization”, or those factors you can control such as content, titles, etc, basically it’s those things you have control over, account for only about 15% of how Google determines your SERP result.

What Google really finds important are the “link building” activities. Who’s linking to you? What is the authority of that site? What keywords are used in the anchor text that points to you? How many people are linking to the particular page? On the minimal side is how much traffic comes to the page, and your registration and hosting information.

So what can we learn from this? First, content is still king! You have control over what you put on your website. And even if it seems to play a very minimal role in ranking, it is how relevance is determined. No matter how many links are coming back to your website, if the site isn’t relevant to a targeted search, then it still won’t index well. So make sure your content is solid.

Second, take the time to build those links. If you don’t know how to do this, then you’ll want to retain the services of a professional Internet Marketer. When you do, make sure to ask about their methodology of building links. If they’re going to register your site with a bunch of link farms or try to build a bunch of reciprocal links, then you’re wasting your time. You want high-quality links from site that are authoritative and relevant for your target search.

Avoiding the Marketing Head Cold

I hate summer time colds, and of course I’ve gotten one.  As I was sitting here this morning nursing my achy muscles and congested sinuses, it made me start thinking about marketing.  You see, when we get a head cold, it comes on suddenly, and we wonder what happened to make us get it.  Then, we’re suffering through it, wondering how long it’s going to last.  Marketing can be very similar.

With marketing, we often do things because they “worked in the past”.  Then when things don’t work out so well, we wonder why.  As our bottom line starts to suffer (much like the achy muscles of being sick), we wonder how long it’s going to last, and what we can do to end the suffering.

Well, here’s a few tips that act like Dayquil for your marketing:

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Commonly missed SEO Principles

I read a great blog today about 10 rules for inbound marketing.  As I read through this, it made me think about some of the commonly overlooked pieces of the SEO puzzle: (more…)

SEO Strategies

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz lately about so-called white-hat and black-hat SEO practices.  But what exactly is the difference, and does it matter?  I saw a great article this morning on the SEO Traffic Spider that clarified things for me:

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site.

So does it matter whether you use ethical or unethical practices of SEO?  Well aside from the philosophical perspective on this, yes it does.  Among other things, you can be completely banned or drilled down in the results for trying to manipulate search engines like Google. Is it worth it? Probably not. (more…)

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