Search Engine Marketing Info and Strategies

Two posts ago, I talked about the importance of laying a web analytics foundation for your company by measuring, valuing and analyzing the critical few visitor behaviors on your site that have an impact on your bottom line.  In my last post, I talked about the step after that, which is determine why the data you’ve collected is the way it is (the why?). Once you’ve listened to why your customers couldn’t complete whatever tasks they were trying to accomplish on your site, you should have a bunch of ideas on how to fix it.

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Engaging in proper site SEO isn’t about pulling out a checklist that you can run through in a month, check them all off and say all done! A good optimization strategy consists of a variety of moving parts. Check one issue off your task list today and two more problems show up on your radar. Good SEO is kind of like an engine: There are many working parts, any of which can (and should) be improved, repaired or replaced to boost your vehicle’s performance. The more your engine is used, the more work there is to do to keep the engine in top shape.

With that said, there are some basic components of every SEO campaign (not to mention a really big checklist) that form the foundation of a successful campaign. Anyone who’s been around SEO for any length of time already knows these “basics,” but they bear repeating for anyone who is unfamiliar as to where to begin with their SEO effort: Click here to keep learning

How much link value does a tweet or Facebook like have? It just depends. White hat link builders know that, in most cases, high quality links take time to obtain. The same holds true in using social media to build links. Here are three things to consider.

Have Content Worthy Of Linking To

If you’ve been listening to or engaging in conversations regarding web marketing, you’ve probably heard this mentioned as often as the Pittsburgh Steelers have been to the Super Bowl: you’ve got to have great content to build links.

Having just one piece of content won’t be enough to sustain value over time. It’s vital to have a content strategy. By having a strategy, you’re able to build a following that generally consists of your target audience. If you create well-researched and well-written content around their needs, you’ll naturally build links and become a source of authority. Blogs can be a great platform for sharing content, but there are many other innovative content types.

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In my last post I discussed using personas to create content that targets your potential customer. In that post I defined the differences between personalities and personas:

Persona = motivation (what the visitor needs, why they are on your site)
Personality = temperament (how they navigate, what they need to see or read to find what they want)

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The Web is replete with blog posts and articles that talk about how important link building is, how it can boost your website’s search engine rankings and why you need to be doing it. However, few Web marketing pros offer helpful, practical how-to’s on link building. We decided to change that.

Today we published our latest inbound marketing e-book, the 2012 edition of Link Building Secrets Revealed. Available for download at no cost on the Pole Position Marketing website, the e-book is a compilation of helpful link-building tips from 10 of the industry’s leading link builders, including: Click here to keep learning

There is one report that will work for any type of website, and it qualifies as my nominee for the best web analytics report: Outcomes by All Traffic Sources…this report represents two things you should care about more than anything else: sources of traffic and Outcomes…you can strongly infer the kinds of people coming to your site and why they may be coming…it highlights two questions to focus on first: who? and how much?…If you start with this, you’ll find that your senior executives suddenly care about your web analytics reports…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0 Click here to keep learning

Writing content for a website is easy. Writing good, search-engine-friendly content for a website is hard. Writing great search and user-friendly content for your website is, well, pretty dang difficult. There is a lot that has to be considered when trying to engage your audience because you’re not writing for an audience of one, but of many. And all of them have a personality and motivations of their very own!

When creating engaging content, there are two concepts that you must first understand: why visitors are on your site and what they want to find. These two concepts can be translated into two words: personas and personalities.

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It seems to be getting more and more difficult to define what exactly SEO is. Is it on-page optimization? Link building? Conversion optimization? Or is just about rankings, and leave the rest of that stuff to someone else?

I think it’s some of both and a little of all. SEO has to focus on more than just “getting rankings” and must use the knowledge of the search engines to bring together all the various online marketing elements into a singular web marketing campaign. People seem to be using the term “inbound marketing” more and more to describe this integrated approach.

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Company owners and other business decision makers who handle a web marketing budget are given, whether it’s their fault or not, too much website data that doesn’t directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What’s wrong with this?  Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and the company.  So, when it’s time to decide how to invest, there’s nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money.  To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift to focusing on outcomes.

Step One: What’s the Point?

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Google
Dec 2011: 66.1%
Nov 2011: 65.7%
Change: +0.4

January 2011: 64.6%
Change: +1.5

Yahoo
Dec 2011: 16.2%
Nov 2011: 16.3%
Change: -0.1

January 2011: 17.9%
Change: -1.7

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