Some Bad — Very, Very, Very Bad — SEO Techniques

Want to get your website banned from the search engines? Try some of these little nasties:

1) You know that stuffing keywords in your content is bad, so you try to get around it by “hiding” the stuffing. You can do this by having your text be the same color as your background or you place the keywords far off the page — where your site’s visitors don’t see it. Bad. very bad. Google bans you.

2) Flash implemented in your site. May not get you “banned,” but definitely not competitive. Search engine crawlers do read and index Flash, but they won’t rank you high. Why? Because search engines love text. (Important note: the search engines also are starting to love video, especially if you place keywords. Tip: place keyword-optimized video on your site).

3) Do you show different content to the search engine crawlers that you show to your visitors? This is called cloaking and Google slaps you on the wrist crying “Bad, girl!” May not get you “banned,” but the search engines won’t “like” you. Spammers used to use this technique widely a few years back and you know how much Google hates those who spam. Don’t be among them.

4) Do you love to use Javascript in your website design? If so, the search engines won’t love you if you use it too much because it looks like Greek to them — they don’t know how to “read” it. Use Javascript just a little and be sure to include CSS to move it away from your Web pages’ headers and text.

Keep Google happy with your website and hire GoiMarketing.com to optimize it for you. We can create and optimize a new site for you from scratch, or we can revamp your current site to make the search engine crawlers happy. Contact us today!

Article Marketing or PPC? You Be the Judge of Which is Best

Can article marketing really work to bring traffic to your website? Isn’t it just drivel written by hacks? Doesn’t it take forever to get traffic?

The answer? It depends.

Yes, some articles used in article marketing are downright awful. Grammatically incorrect. Full of misleading or even false information. Rambling. Incoherent. Or dense and packed with too much information.

And, yes article marketing does take longer than well-run pay-per-click campaigns, purchasing online ads, and so on.

But you really shouldn’t ignore it. Done well and done consistently, article marketing can bring you traffic. Traffic that already trusts you. Traffic that is primed to buy. And it will continue doing so long after your pay-per-click or other paid advertising Internet campaign is done.

Paid ad campaigns can be quite costly. If you’re just starting or if your budget is tight (and it usually is when your just starting out), a paid campaign can be out of your budgetary reach. If you can’t spend at least $100 a day for several weeks, paying for ads online may not be in your best interest.

But wait, there’s more: the learning curve to can be steep. You’re going to need to learn:

• local geographic targeting
• keyword selection
• writing ads that get clicked on
• creating a great landing page (the page people go to when they click on your ad)

 

Can you do this successfully? Sure. But you’ll probably spend a good amount of money before you see results. And it could take a long bit of time before your skills are such that a PPC campaign brings you a good ROI.

Why not spend that same amount of time writing and distributing articles to the free article directories? Write an article a day for a month, then two or three times a week for the next couple of months. You’ll start seeing a good amount of traffic coming to your site then.

The three months you conduct a free article campaign could be just about the same time you spend learning how to do PPC correctly. Three months that you’ve been spending a minimum of $100/day. Meanwhile, your article marketing campaign has cost you nothing!

Don’t stop at distributing your articles. Place your articles on your blog (then be sure to tweet about your blog update and place a notice about it on your Facebook page). Put your articles together as a free e-book/report you offer on your website. This will help drive traffic to your site even more.

Turn to GoiMarketing.com online marketing campaign. Whether you decide to go the PPC route or start an article marketing campaign for your business, we can help. We live and breath Internet marketing for small business and we look forward to the opportunity to helping you see your sales and profits grow. Contact us today!

Where to Find Keywords

Do you ever find yourself stumped on keywords? Are you using the online keyword search tools but feel you’re not really “getting” all that you could?

Here are some ways to find keywords that you may not have considered. Try them and see what kind of results you have.

• Check your competitors’ sites. This may sound “sneaky,” but believe us, webmasters do this all the time. Make a list of your top competitors, the ones that rank high in search results. Visit their sites and then right click anywhere on a page. A popup with “View Page Source” or “View Source” will appear. Select it and then you’ll see the keywords your competitors use in their meta tags, description and title. Consider using the keyword you find there on your own site.
• Take some time and think of all the keywords you think your target market uses to find your product/service. Then think of the keywords that might be related to your offering. Then think of keywords that might be related to those keywords.
• Take a look at your site’s own logs. If you’re not tracking how you’re being found, you should start now. Check to see how visitors to your site are arriving. Take the keywords they’re using to find you and add these to your site.
• Ask others for ideas. Talk to your friends, family and business associates for keyword ideas. What keywords do they/would they use when looking for your product or service?
• Let your mind wander. Keywords may come to you when you’re not actively searching for them. This is why it’s a good idea to keep a notebook with you. You could be waiting in traffic, in line at the movies, even out for a night on the town when you’ll see or read something related to your offering and a good keyword idea will come to you. Jot it down as soon as you think of it; it’s too easy to forget it otherwise.

 

When you’re having a hard time thinking of good keywords for your website, come to GoiMarketing.com and let our SEO expertise help you build a successful and profitable business. We look forward to being of service.

 

Some Little Known SEO Secrets

Search engine optimization techniques can change as quickly as the seasons: what worked even three months ago may not be as efficient as what helps your site get found in organic searches today.

Here are some little known SEO “secrets” you can try on your website, especially if your product or service is one sold to people in your area (you own a flower shop, a cafe, a plumbing service, etc.).

Be sure to include your city and state in your keywords. If you own a flower shop in Womelsdorf, PA, for example, be sure to include those words in your keyword phrases. In fact, many SEO experts recommend you spell out your state. So using the example above, your keywords could be “flowers Womelsdorf Pennsylvania” or “Womelsdorf Pennsylvania flowers.”

Are you a shoe retailer? Do you sell, for example, Merrell shoes? Is that brand on your website? If not, list it, as well as any other brands your target market looks for. Place these brands in your website’s tags. Also, contact your vendors about having a link from their sites to yours.

Purchase domain names that are similar to your website’s and forward those domain back to your website. For example, if your flower shop has a family name (Brown’s Blooms) and your website is http://www.brownsblooms.com, purchase a domain such as WomelsdorfPennsylvaniaFlowers.com and have that forwarded to your website. This helps you get local traffic to your business’ site.

People using search engines often misspell things. You can use this to your advantage by taking common misspellings and using them as keywords. Even Google does this. Type http://www.gogle.com in your url and see what comes up!

Get backlinks from local sites. Find local online directories for your area and get listed. These would include directories run by your local chamber of commerce, newspapers, etc.

Are you active on social media? Do you tweet — with a link — on Twitter that your site has new offerings? Do you mention — with a link — on Facebook that you have a new blog post? Aim to tweet at least five times a day, with at least one of those tweets including a link to your site. Post to Facebook at least once a day and work to include a link to your website. Post to your blog once a week at the bare minimum (two or three is better), with a link a pertinent page of your website.

As we mentioned above, SEO techniques change quickly. It’s tough to stay on top of them. Which is why GoiMarketing.com can prove to be a valuable partner. We live and breathe SEO, so we’re always up-to-date on the latest SEO tools and trends. Contact us today so that we can keep your website’s SEO up-to-date, too.

 

Top Tips for Your SEO Campaign

Marketing with SEO isn’t difficult, so long as you know what you’re doing. Once you understand SEO, it’s not hard to conduct an SEO marketing campaign that brings real results.

Not hard, but it’s not simple — SEO can be a challenge to “get” if you don’t live and breath it as the experts at an SEO company do. And it can take months to really feel that you have a good grasp of the concepts.

Still, here are some top SEO tips:

Don’t use the same meta tags for each one of your pages. Instead, make sure each page is unique and focuses on a different keyword phrase. So, for example, if you’re a dermatologist in Van Nuys, California, and you use the keyword phrase “Dermatologist Van Nuys,” you’ll want your second page to focus on a keyword phrase such as “skin care Van Nuys” or even “Van Nuys skin care.” And so on.

Keep your website current. That is, if you held a dermatology special in June but it’s now August, you should be sure to remove that information from your site.

No keyword stuffing. That means no using the same keyword phrases over and over and over again. First of all, search engine spiders are “on” to such tactics and will penalize you for trying to place too many keywords on your site. Secondly, a keyword-stuffed page is an unreadable page. Instead, aim for a focus on no more than one or two keyword phrases a page and keep the number of times a phrase appears on a 500-word page to no more than three or four.

Speaking of readability, be sure to write informative, accurate, engaging and original content. Copying content from another site onto yours is a form of plagiarism and could land you in legal hot water. In addition, search engines want original content. You’re site won’t be “penalized” if you have duplicate content, but it won’t rank high either. The spiders compare different sites with the same content and then decide which site is more “important,” by taking a look at how many people link to a site, how many people visit a site, how long a site has been up, and other factors. The site with the higher “score” among sites with duplicate content gets ranked higher. You’ll have a better chance of ranking well if you have original content.

As we mentioned above, optimizing a site isn’t rocket science. It can be learned relatively easily. It just takes a good amount of time. When time is of the essence, why not ask the SEO experts at GoiMarketing.com to optimize your site. It’s what we do. So let us do what we do best and let your business reap the benefits — more site visitors and more sales. Contact us today.

SEO for Your Small Business

It’s official; online advertising has passed print advertising in overall spending in 2010.

If you’re not spending the resources to capture your target market when they go online to look for your product/service, you ARE losing business.

Another fun fact: 60 percent of all businesses are putting more money into online advertising than to off-line, traditional marketing. Are you one of  those businesses?

Your customers today don’t wait for you to give them information; they’re finding it themselves online, using the Internet to research price, features, benefits and sellers of the products and services you provide.

Are you helping your potential customers in their decision making process, or are you letting your competitors do so?

If you’re not, having your website properly optimized for the search engines (search engine optimization, or SEO), can go a long way to your business being found at the top of a search engine’s results. Since almost 90 percent of consumers use the Internet to research their purchases, your website needs to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Yet you must understand that proper optimization takes time — possibly a good three months until you see meaningful results.

But as a long-term marketing strategy, optimization is exceptionally cost effective and has one of the lowest customer acquisition costs over the long-term compared to other marketing and advertising strategies.

A good SEO company will be able to research and ascertain the proper combination of SEO strategies, and can meld it into a successful integrated marketing plan.

As you work with your SEO company, you’ll want to ask them to ensure that links to your site appear in three sections of a search engine result: the maps section (where people look local for providers of products and services), the paid section (usually the results at the very top and right hand side of a page; these are paid advertisements), and the organic section (your business ranks high in organic when your site has been properly optimized for keywords).