In light of this weeks blog topic, im going to keep this entry short, sweet, and straight to the point. After all, that is one of the recommendations im going to give out today so I better follow my own advice, right?

1.       Short, Straight Jabs

In some writing arenas, like novels, being longwinded is the way to go. Not for blogging. When blogging, one of the most important things you can do is write a piece that is just long enough to offer all the details a reader is interested in but just short enough to keep the readers interest all the way through.

Include as much information as you can in as few words as you can.

2.       Treasure Map Formatting

People read online in a very different manner than they read books or magazines. When reading online, people scan over headlines to find something that sounds interesting to them. They read a little bit and then move on the next headline.

Much like I am doing in this blog, create a clean, easy to understand format with catchy titles for each new section. Do not, I repeat, do not clump all of your writing together in giant paragraphs with no descriptive headlines. That is the quickest way to turn a reader away online.

3.       Write For The Reader, Not For You

When it comes to internet marketing, its very easy to forget that you are not just writing to appease the search engines. If you are creating content strictly to gain rankings, it will show in your writing.

Make your best effort to write about things that your audience will value. The idea is to write entries that will make people want to keep revisiting your site and pass it on to their friends.

Like I said, short, sweet, and straight to the point! Enjoy the heck out of your weekend and don’t forget to tune into the second installment of Manic Mondays with Chelsea on Monday morning.

The internet is filled with many directory resources. Many of them are a complete waste of time, money and can even potentially harm the success of your site. The search engines are constantly looking for the low quality, sneaky efforts of site owners to advance their websites.

I once had a conversation with an ex technology executive at IBM who is now involved with a small outside venture. We were talking about link building strategies and he said some things that (after some extensive research and investigation) were absolutely appalling to me. He was talking about a black hat technique called article spinning and he was also talking about mass directory submission.

After doing some extensive research of my own, Ive come to learn how incredibly detrimental techniques like these can be. I learned a valuable lesson from my interactions with this man: Age, experience and position does not mean

Solution: Always go for quality rather than quantity. Here is a list of the top 3 paid directories to submit your site to.

1.       www.dir.yahoo.com

The Yahoo Directory is one of the oldest and best directories on the web. It offers high authority and valuable links back to your site and can also drive a fair amount of traffic to your site.

The cost to submit to this directory is a onetime fee of $299.95.

2.       www.botw.org

Best of The Web Directory is a very high quality and high authority directory. Directories like this are an absolute must to submit your site to.

The fee for this directory is the same as Yahoo…onetime fee of $299.95.

3.       www.business.com

Business.com is a very well established and respected directory. It has been around for a very long time and holds a great deal of weight with the search engines.

The cost of inclusion for this directory is a onetime fee of $299.00

The benefit of submitting to directories is that you gain increased internet exposure, back links and an increase of relevant traffic.

We encourage all of our clients to submit to these directories in addition to www.dmoz.com and any high authority industry specific directories.

Happy Friday and enjoy your weekend!

Internet Marketing is one of the most profitable and cost effective forms of marketing to ever exist. With a relatively low investment and expert knowledge of internet marketing to support it, you can build a multimillion dollar business online without ever having to pay for any type of traditional marketing services. Obviously, having a full bodied marketing campaign that includes internet and traditional marketing tactics will drive an even higher return; however, it’s not absolutely necessary.

However, it seems that many people enter into the internet marketing arena without a true understanding of how much work is actually involved. Thus, I have chosen to publish this week’s Top 3 entry on the Top 3 Reasons to Hire an Internet Marketing Firm.

1.       Time Investment

If you are in a position to even be considering the acquisition of professional assistance in this area, it typically means that you already have a business up and running and you most likely already have a site up that is not returning great results.  

If you are the owner of a business, your time needs to be spent RUNNING THE BUSINESS. Even if you have a mediocre understanding of SEO and some of its counterparts, it is doubtful that you’ll have the time to execute even the initial steps, let alone the ongoing steps. SEO is not a product that you can purchase or replicate; it is an ongoing process that involves strategy development and implementation, analytical review, trial and error, trouble shooting, ongoing education and lots of time.

Forgive me for being harsh, but if a business owner has the time to invest in learning and implementing SEO then some other part of the business operation is being neglected. Do yourself a favor and hire a firm that has the experience, knowledge, time and processes to make things as painless as possible.

2.       Knowledge

 

If the transmission dropped out of your vehicle today would you go buy books, read blogs and waste time trying to fix your vehicle yourself? (if your hobby is fixing cars, just play along) NO! You’d take your car to an auto mechanic who already has the knowledge to fix your car in the most cost effective and time efficient manner.

 

Why would you treat your online marketing campaign any differently?

3.       Experience

The bottom line is that any quality internet marketing firm possesses a great deal of experience with many different websites in many different arenas. We know what works and what doesn’t through actual experience, not theory. A quality internet marketing firm will save its clients time, money, head ache and failure as a result of the years of cumulative experience shared between all of its team members.

Hire a firm, save time and money and see success!

Welcome to another edition of “Top 3 Fridays”. Today I’m going to be talking about why an article syndication campaign is absolutely vital to any SEO campaign. In my opinion, having a high level, off-site, article campaign is a vital aspect of SEO. It’s not an optional aspect because it is part of the actual SEO process. Creating quality content that is relevant to your industry and then dispersing it to various websites across the net with links back to your site is of the utmost importance.

Most people are not aware of the scope of the work that is involved in search engine optimization. Of course, there are novice SEO’s that will just stuff a website with keywords and write pages and pages of irrelevant content in a pathetic attempt to achieve rankings. However, any seasoned professional knows that having a unique, well planned out strategy for SEO is a lot of work and very time consuming.

 

The 2 Categories of SEO

 

1.       On-Site Optimization

 

On-site optimization is anything that is done on your actual website to make it search engine friendly.  Some of these tactics are as follows:

 

·         Meta Data Optimization

·         URL Optimization

·         Content Optimization

·         Site Architecture Optimization

 

2.       Off-Site Optimization

 

As the name implies, this part of SEO includes anything that is done on other websites to establish your website as an authority site. Some of these strategies include the following:

 

·         Article Syndication

·         Guest Blogging

·         Video Optimization

·         Social Media Marketing

 

 

I’m not going to go into great detail here; however, what I am going to do is address the top 3 aspects on-site optimization.  Although all aspects of SEO are equally important in the big picture, every SEO campaign begins with the basics of on-site optimization.

 

 

 

1.       Met Data Optimization

 

Meta data optimization is vital to the success of any SEO campaign. Obviously, before you can optimize your meta data, you need to go through the process of keyword selection. Your keyword selection should be based on 2 metrics:

 

a)       Highest search volume

b)       Lowest competition

 

Once you have selected your keywords and assigned them to the appropriate pages on your site, its time to optimize your meta data. This does NOT mean that you just stuff the keywords in your meta tags as many times as you can, like some novice SEO’s do. There is a method to the madness and adhering to the method always delivers the most success.

 

2.       Content Optimization

 

As the saying goes, “content is king” in the world of online marketing. What else is there on the web? Everything is content on the web and the higher the quality of your on-site content, the better your site is going to rank in the search engines.

 

Much like meta data, optimizing your content is not about just throwing the keyword in there as many times as you can. Its always best to have an SEO veteran optimize your content for you. This insures that you are not doing anything that will harm your progress in the SERPs.

 

 

3.       Site Architecture

 

 

Having a website designed (or redesigned) in a way that makes for an easy crawling experience is vital. The architecture of your website can make or break the user experience and the way that the search engines crawl your site. If your site is difficult for the search engine’s spiders to crawl, you can bet that your site is not going to rank very well.

 

I’ve ranked the above listed on-site strategies as the top 3 most important; however, it is even more important to remember that this is only a small fraction of the pie. Successful search engine optimization requires the implementation of many tedious strategies, congruently. It is a lot of fun to see the results of SEO, but the time investment involved makes the acquisition of an outside agency worth your dollar.

 

That’s all for today!