On-page SEO is a simple task that helps search engines better understand the content and context of your web pages. Optimizing a webpage properly can also drive more relevant traffic to your website. Although simple to implement, many still take the lazy road and omit this piece of the process from their content marketing activities.
WordPress powers 25 percent of all websites. Small businesses, whether they blog or not, are taking advantage of the simplicity and power of this content management platform. WordPress allows you to take control of your website, making it easy to keep it updated with fresh, relevant content. But all that great content is useless if it can’t be readily found by those searching. To optimize WordPress effectively, you need to pay attention to both content and website performance.
Having an inbound marketing strategy is the core to your online marketing efforts. Inbound marketing is the art of attracting our customers to us by providing valuable information, rather than pushing our products and services on them. Creating and sharing useful content helps the buyer move through the purchase process and makes your business more credible, trustworthy, and visible in the process.
Everyone knows that your blog post needs eye-catching images to help capture the interest of the reader. Using the right images can keep visitors on your page longer and generate more traffic. Unfortunately most authors simply upload images without thought to proper image optimization.
Keyword research is one of the most important and valuable activities in marketing, not just search engine marketing, but marketing in general and should be the starting point of your marketing plan. We know that people are doing more and more of their research online to determine what they want to buy and who they want to buy from. Consider keyword research as a component of market research that helps us better understand what our target markets are interested in and what terms they use to find what they need.
Searching the web from mobile devices is projected to overtake desktop search by 2015. Doesn’t seem surprising as it appears that people are tethered to their smartphones as if it is an extra appendage. But there is no doubt that mobile search will impact your business and your marketing activities. What are you doing now to accommodate visitors who arrive at their destination only to click away to your competition because your site is not the user experience they have come to expect?
In my last post on SEO best practices, we covered the SEO techniques that can increase visibility in the search engine results. Now we will take a look at SEO worst practices that must be avoided if you don’t want to end up in the Google penalty box.
A lot of great advice has been written about the new search engine optimization (SEO) rules due to the Panda and Penguin releases of Google’s algorithm. In many cases, what previously worked may no longer and some of the practices can damage the ranking of your website. If you are implementing an inbound marketing strategy, make sure you are familiar with the new, up-to-date SEO best practices and stay away from the older techniques, which will be coming in my next post, that could get your website penalized.
Let’s face it! Your future patients, clients and customers are going to find you one of two ways: Through a referral from a family member or friend, or by searching online using keywords containing a local component. And if they look online and you aren’t there, or worse, you are there with negative reviews and an inconsistent brand, they will choose someone else to meet their needs. So in order to effectively compete, you need a high quality online presence that is consistent, controlled by you and helps your business or practice stand out from the rest.
For many of my clients, being found by those searching for local businesses can make a huge difference in the number of inbound leads they receive. If you are a local business (i.e. you service clients within a specific geography or have a store front) and haven’t implemented a local search strategy, your missing a huge opportunity to grow your business. Google has made many changes to how businesses get ranked in the past 6 months so if you are getting advice from blog posts before October 2010 about the important factors that help you get found on the Google Map, it is out of date and you may be mislead on what works and what doesn’t. First let’s start […]
