As we all know, blogging is a vitally important aspect of SEO. That being said, there are many components to blogging . The best strategy that you can have in mind when creating your blog campaign is that you are trying to create the highest level of SEO and simultaneously making your blog read worthy. In other words, people should want to read your blog.

Instead of making you read my own rambling today, I thought I’d give you some fresh perspective on this topic from some excellent authority figures in the SEO industry.

1.       www.seomoz.org/blog/5-simple-tips-for-better-seo-value-from-your-blogs-feeds

This blog entry offers some great tips on how to get more eyes on your blog, and how to increase the SEO value of your blog.

2.       www.seomoz.org/blog/Blog-Launch-Check-list

This is an excellent blog that gives you a comprehensive checklist for launching a blog! Use this when we launch your blog to keep us on our A game

3.       www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tips-to-earn-links-and-tweets-to-your-blog-post

This is yet another wonderfully informative blog about successful blogging from the SEO guru Rand Fishkin at seomoz.com.

Please enjoy these blogs and feel free to contact us directly if you have any questions, concerns or would like to talk about getting your blog in motion!

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!

Internet Marketing is an unbelievably broad field. With everything from email marketing, to affiliate marketing to SEO, it can be difficult for a novice to decide what is going to provide the most benefit for their internet sales.

 

With a little over 4 years in the industry, ive seen quite a bit of success derived from many different sources of internet marketing. However, I would have to say that there are 3 platforms that absolutely Trump all other forms (for most industries).

 

 

 

1.       Search Engine Optimization

 

This probably goes without saying, but SEO is probably the most cost effective form of marketing with the highest return on in investment. Aside from the cost of hiring professionals to get the job done for you, ranking well in the search engines is free.

 

I put SEO at the top of the list because when you are ranking well within the search engines, you are placing yourself directly in front of people that are specifically looking for your product or service. This is unique to ANY other form of traditional marketing. With traditional marketing, most of the time you are trying to get yourself into places where your target demographic is and hoping that they just happen to be interested in what you have to offer.  Not with SEO. They are looking for you, it’s your job to be there.

 

2.       Pay Per Click

 

Regardless of what anyone says, PPC marketing is effective. Obviously, SEO has many advantages over PPC. However, PPC is an excellent addition to any internet marketing campaign. You can literally start seeing results from a PPC campaign overnight.

 

3.       Social Media Marketing

 

Im really not a “bandwagon” kind of guy. Actually, when I see a bandwagon start rolling, Im usually the first to skeptically investigate. However, with Social Media Marketing, I can say that it’s definitely a bandwagon you want to be on. With over 60% of Americans using social media, it would be an internet marketing sin for you to not be there when your customers are looking for you.

 

Social Media Marketing can also be used as a way to boost your SEO campaign and it is a huge way to keep residual traffic flowing to your site.

 

Anyways, I’ve done enough babbling for one day. Please have a fun, safe and long memorial day weekend!

Facebook is constantly updating and revising their privacy settings in response to user frustration and confusion. The interview below with Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s public policy director, talks about the new changes taking place and answers some questions about Facebook conquering the web.



Is Facebook the one that’s taking over the web? Aren’t we Facebook? To help you, we're providing you with 5 essentials to help you with your Facebook Privacy.

Tell us what you think! Please :)

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.

Here is an infographic with Facebook facts that are great to know and even better to use for impressing everyone else.


[Source: Online PhD Programs for MashableMashable.com]

The next time you log into Twitter, pay attention to the side bar. Under your stats, there'll be a white box with rounded corners, where there is a promotion for a Twitter-integrated website. Often, I find these promotions helpful, and it was one of these that turned me on to fantastic iPhone application called Twitterrific. Over the next few weeks, I will be reviewing the different websites that Twitter promotes.

The first of the aforementioned websites is Topsy, a search engine powered by Tweets. According to the website, "Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. When you search for something on Topsy, it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for. Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms."

That said, Topsy isn't shouldn't replace your default search engine, it isn't as powerful. A "honda accord" inquiry will return tweets that include a photo of a stolen Honda Accord, a Facebook note which describes a Honda Accord, and a how-to article on converting your Honda Accord to run on trash. Similarly an inquiry of "the big bang theory" will return tweets with links to torrents for the hit TV series The Big Bang Theory, news about the show, et cetera. What it will not give you is information on the Big Bang Theory, a scientific theory.

There is an upside to Topsy, and that is the search results are up-to-date. Because the service is based on conversations that are happening in the present, the results will change instantly.

Try it out for yourself.

In my 4 + years in the SEM industry I have noticed a very strong trend among many of the clients I have worked with: they are reluctant to put a blog on their website. There are usually two dominant reasons for this:

1.     They do not have anyone in-house that has the time to publish content

2.     They do not fully comprehend the benefit of having an on-site blog

As a result of this trend, I thought I’d publish a blog entry on the top 3 reasons to have an on-site blog. In my opinion, having a blog on your site should not be optional anymore…it should be a mandatory requirement punishable by imprisonment…okay, maybe that’s a little extreme but it think it paints a clear picture of how important I think blogs are.

1.     Site Authority

When you create an on-site blog and keep it updated with fresh, entertaining and quality information you establish yourself as an authority website. One of the most important things you can do is give people a reason to continue visiting your website on a regular basis, whether they are buying something from you every time or not.

The internet was established on the foundation of free information exchange. The more free information you give people (within reason), the more authoritative your website is. You will be building a brand for yourself online and giving people good reason to keep coming back to your site. People will also start talking about your site and referring friends to your site. Word of mouth spreads like wild fire.

Establishing your site as an authority also helps your search engine rankings tremendously. The search engines (especially Google) have a funny way of recognizing authority sites.

 

2.     Link building

The other day I was reading a blog entry about a site that received over 800 back links to just 1 blog entry. That is incredible! If you were to try and manually acquire 800 back links to your website, it would take you countless hours, days, weeks, and months. This site acquired all of those links from investing 2 hours in a quality blog entry. Those 800 links are in addition to all of their other inbound links. There link score goes up every time they publish a blog entry.

Obviously, 800 is a very high number and I would never tell a client to expect anything close to that on a per entry basis, however, it shows you what is possible if you just invest the time in creating a quality blog.

Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO. It is also one of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of SEO. Rather than going out and trying to manually acquire thousands of links, why not just give people a great reason to link to your site naturally?

3.     Your Customers Want You to Have a Blog

Let’s look at some numbers:

60% of Americans use social media

59% of those interact with companies on social media sites/blogs

93% of social media users believe companies should have a social media presence

85% of those believe companies should proactively interact with their customers via social media

Source: Cone Research

 

1 in 3 online Americans now read blogs at least once a month

18% of blog readers comment on blogs

In 2008 alone, blog readers as a whole grew by nearly 50%

 

In reason number 3, I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. In conclusion, these 3 reasons alone should be more than enough motivation to get started on a blog asap. That concludes this week’s “Top 3 Friday”. Please enjoy your weekend!

 

At the moment, I'm helping my friend set up his own blog on WordPress. As I was going through the settings, I came across one of the really neat features that WordPress provides for: permalinks. A permalink, according to Wikipedia, is "is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives."

For example, Corporate Search Optimization's permalinks look like this:

http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/blog/year/month/day/%postname%.aspx

Basically, it's the URL to the page of the blog entry.

There are a lot of other permalink structures, such as:

http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/?p=123
http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/year/month/day/sample-post/
http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/year/month/%postname%/
http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/archives/123

As a blogger (and as a web developer), what would be the best permalink structure to allow for efficient search engine optimization? The best would be to include a category, a date, and/or a post name in the URL. Put as much information in the permalink, so there appears more keywords for spiders.

http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/?p=123 tells the reader nothing about your post, whereas http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/seo-and-social-marketing/permalinks-and-seo/ or http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/2010/05/03/permalinks-and-seo/ gives the readers a pretty good idea what to expect within the post.

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!