Archive for the ‘4. Advanced Marketing Strategies’ Category
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 If you”re new to SEO and want to get your website seen by search engines, the basics are enough for a cursory ranking, and sometimes you won”t need anything else. For example, if your keywords don”t have a lot of competition, simply optimizing your content might be enough to get you up to the first or second page of Google. However, if you”re struggling to get your ranking up, or if you just want to ensure that your on-site SEO is as tight as possible, here are a few advanced techniques to practice.
Title and Meta Tags
Adjusting these tags requires a very slight knowledge of HTML, but it”s easy enough to pick up. If you go into the HTML of your site, we”re looking for the <title> and <meta> tags. Hitting CTRL F and then typing those into the search field will bring them up. They”ll be close to the top of the page.
Title Tag
The <title> tag is what is displayed as the main title of a web page when it pops up in the search results. If you”re doing a search, you”ll instinctively look at that first to see what the page is about. By default, most pages will display the main title of the page. This is usually enough, but if you”re the type of person who likes to write more “artistic” titles, it might not serve you well. Let”s look at an example of when you might use this:
You have a post on your site”s blog about proper SEO strategy, with the title “Working Out the Kinks In Your Home Page.” It”s interesting, but it doesn”t convey a lot of information about what the post is actually about. Instead of changing the title itself, you can change the <title> tag to something more concise, maybe “SEO Guide for Optimizing a Home Page.” Ideally, this would have your main keyword in it.
Meta Tag
The <meta> tag fulfills a similar purpose, but it gives a short sentence or two summarizing the page. In search results, this is the little blurb below the title and link. If this tag is blank, the search engines will do their best to pull up the most relevant section of the content. You can control what appears, however, by writing it in yourself in the <meta> tag. Again, use your main keyword here (just once) to get the most out of it.
Additionally, you have another option with your <meta> tags. The first is the “Description,” which is what we just talked about, and the second is the “keywords,” which, unlike the description, won”t be visible in the results. The two can be differentiated like this:
<meta name=”"Description”"
<meta name=”"Keywords”"
When putting in the keywords; do it in list form with a comma between each keyword. Try to keep it to fewer than 7 per page.
It”s important to note that after some of the recent Google updates in 2011, Meta tags don”t carry as much weight with ranking. They”re still important however, so don”t completely ignore them.
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| Posted in 4. Advanced Marketing Strategies |
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 One of the biggest mistakes you”ll see in business blogs these days is off-topic content. This not only hurts the site in terms of SEO value, but gives the readers information that they frankly probably couldn”t care less about. This is an important suggestion for any blog, but it”s especially relevant for business blogs. Depending on your niche, it can be easy to stray off the main topic, but time and time again we see that focused, niche-oriented blogs, perform the best.
Why is that the case? Think about it from your readers” points of view. People want a guarantee of what they will find when they go back to a website. If you go to Inc.com, what will you find? Business tips and entrepreneurial news. If you go to food.com, you get recipes. These websites have a formula and it hinges around staying focused on their main niche. If Inc suddenly started posting recipes, you”d probably lose interest pretty fast, as would most of their readership. The point isn”t necessarily that those readers don”t like recipes; it”s just that they don”t go to Inc to get them.
Your blog should be laser targeted on a single niche, and every post needs to bring something new to the table regarding that niche. We”ve talked before on how to introduce variety, but how can you do that while still keeping the same focus on your blog?
#1- Figure Out Your Goal For Your Blog
Before doing anything, figure out what exactly you expect to get out of blogging. Is it to bring in more sales? To increase your brand exposure? To educate people on what you do? Something that seems plain cut on the outside can have multiple different angles once you dig deeper. Write down some different goals and then figure out what your main focus is.
#2- Research Keywords
Once you have your goal figured out, do some research on specific keywords that people may be using to find that information that you plan to provide. Keywords are obviously important for SEO, but they can serve to help you stay focused with your posts. Anytime you think of a new post, review your keywords to see if it matches with your original goals. If throwing the keywords in would make it awkward, it”s probably not the best post for your blog.
#3- Figure Out a Specific Topic In Your Industry
Try to pinpoint a specific topic or skill set within your industry that you know a lot about. Let”s say your company sells and installs AC units, but you know quite a bit about changing out filters and which types of filters work well in various units. You can run with that and turn your blog into a go-to source for filter changing advice. That”s a specific example, but you can apply the same logic to any type of industry.
#4- Give Your Audience What They Want
Finally, focus on what your audience wants to read. Use your market research here and figure out what type of people you want to attract to your blog. What would these people search for when they want information? And, what will ultimately take them to your products/services page to make a purchase?
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| Posted in 4. Advanced Marketing Strategies |
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|  When it comes to setting up a new business blog, one of the biggest mistakes that fledgling businesses make is posting too much brand-centered content. Now, I realize that at face value this might seem like the best strategy – it”s your site, why not promote it? – but in reality this tends to turn away viewers who aren”t actively interested in making a purchase at the time.
One of the main reasons that people come to blogs is to get free information, sometimes entertainment if the blog is set up to provide it. When they stumble across a blog that provides a wealth of useful information, they are much more likely to come back to that blog sometime in the future, bookmark it, share it with friends, and basically spread the word about it. On the other hand, if the blog is obviously marketing their own products with every single blog post, they have a hard time feeling secure when it comes to trusting that information. It”s obviously biased, so they would rather just get the information from a source they can trust.
The way to fix this is to add in some extra variety in your blog posts. Rather than taking a product-centric stance on your blogging, search for ways to provide reliable, educational content that people can use – even if they don”t purchase one of your products. Make it a mix between the purely educational, thought provoking opinions, and data offerings to give your visitors enough variety to keep coming back for more.
What will happen as you do this is that your blog will eventually be seen as an authority on your niche market. Since people have the tendency to share information that has helped them, you”ll be able to reach out to a wider audience, in the meantime bringing in more potential customers. Your visitors will begin to associate your website with useful advice and valuable market expertise, which will in turn boost your credibility and give people trust in any products that you offer elsewhere on the site.
To put it simply, your goal with your business blog should be to become a thought leader in your particular industry. When a new industry breakthrough hits the airwaves, your blog will be the first place people turn to, to get the reliable facts. You can do this in several ways, the easiest of which is to simply post informative content based on your own experiences. For example, if you run a gardening supply website, post guides for planting during different seasons. If you have a law firm, put out some recent case studies or factual data, or publish pieces of interest on recent cases that fall under your area of expertise.
The key is to mix it up and take the main focus of your blog off your particular products or services. The more you are able to do that, the more you”ll begin to see that you don”t need to constantly plug your products to keep up the sales volume.
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| Posted in 4. Advanced Marketing Strategies |
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