Your Untapped Goldmine

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Lauren Santucci

Most Companies have a website with information about who they are and what they do. However, most Companies do not continually grow the content on their website. It remains stagnant, unchanging. Yawn.

Website content or onsite SEO has always been important. But today, more than ever, it is vital that you are creating quality content that speaks to your target audience. Furthermore, it is essential that you are using email marketing and social media platforms to get that content in front of your target audience(s).

Customers ask me: “How is this really going to help get more leads from the Internet?”

If you examine the leads from a typical website, you will find most of the leads come from hundreds of long-tailed keywords. Long-tailed keywords are phrases that are three or more words in length that describe your products and/or services. Adding content to your website is the best way of building hundreds or even thousands of long-tailed keywords into the content of your website.

The next question I get from customers is: “How can we add stuff to our website?”

It is best if you have a blog attached to your website that allows you to quickly and easily add content to your site. For example, you would create the following URL: blog.YourWebsite.com. Here at Spectrum, we attach a blog to every customer website. Additionally, our customers have web browser access to their blog, and we work together with our customers to help them publish and market industry specific, rich content on their blog.

Now that you understand how to start adding content to your website easily, the next step is equally important, getting the word out to the world. It can be argued that just adding content to your site will help with rankings, traffic and leads, as the search engines crawl your site, find the content and index it.

However, the best way to speed up this process is through email and social syndication. Writing teaser copy and posting it to your social sites like, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter will help spread the information quickly. Additionally, using email marketing to send to customers, previous website visitors and prospects will reach different members of your target audiences.

Here is another thing I hear from customers: “We don’t have an email list.”

And here is the gold mine you didn’t even know you had:

Your website
Email forms on your website, including a request form or a quote form

You have been collecting email addresses for many years that you have not taken advantage of. It’s time to take advantage now! The list of email addresses from your website is a perfect place to start syndicating quality content that speaks to your target audience(s). Another great source for email addresses is your email software, i.e. Outlook. You can build an email list from the received and sent email addresses. Now all you need to do is get started!

Google: April’s Search Quality Highlights

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Chuck Turack

Each month now Matt Cutts posts some information about the changes to Google’s search algorithm. You can visit the blog here. This is a great resource and helps us in the SEO world determine if we need to make any changes to our SEO strategy. However, for those of you that are not experts, here is the important stuff and what it means to you:

1. “Improvements to local navigational searches.” – This is an attempt to get better results for searches that include location information(city, zip, etc). This will affect business that rely on ‘local’ traffic from web searches to get local leads. Key factors to help determine if a site will be effected are: site navigation, ‘location’ pages, maps/address data.

2. “No freshness boost for low-quality content. ” – Freshness of content has long been a factor in Google ranking algorithm. This update takes the quality of the content into account when evaluating new content. To comply with this, make sure all new content you add to any of your web properties is not only unique, make sure it is accurate and valuable as well.

3. “Keyword stuffing classifier improvement.” – Keyword stuffing is using a key term many time within a document to try and manipulate the results. Say, including the term ‘Chicago movers’ on a page 50+ times in many different areas on the page; title tags, alt tags, main navigation, body, anchors, footer, etc. This has been a SEO topic for a long time, but Google is basically tightening the belt here. Actively looking for more keyword stuffing while diminishing the value of those key words in certain places. make sure your not using any one key word to often. If you us standard grammar, write quality content, and have a company like Spectrum to handle the website code, you’ll be in good shape.

The 49 other updates in the article, while important, don’t have a large impact on SEO as a broad topic, most will only effect a small set of results. Have any questions? Ask me on Twitter @SEOesq .

Google Puts a Freeze on Web SPAM

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Lauren Santucci

Local search is changing the way consumers find and purchase products. Google is an ever evolving animal with the most recent change being Google’s algorithm adjustment referred to as the Penguin Update (Previously known as the Webspam Update). This update is Google’s way of cracking down on search engine manipulation to maintain a quality web experience for users – cleaning up the spam in other words. Google’s quality guidelines explain what features are needed to create a good website from the viewpoint of their engineers. The SEO engineers at Spectrum make sure to follow these quality guidelines to prevent the Penguin update from affecting your website. We stick to these ethical SEO best practices:

Make your site’s webpages for your readers, not just for search engine optimization. Quality content is crucial when creating and maintaining a solid web presence, and is even more important when trying to gain good SERP(search engine results page) real estate.
Don’t use black hat SEO techniques because they are used to get higher SERP rankings in an unethical manner.
Avoid link building shortcuts. Do not participate in paid link building or link building exchange schemes to increase your website’s page rank.

With the Penguin Update, penalties will be given to those website’s practicing unethical SEO techniques, and in the case of Google’s 2011 Panda Update – praise for good techniques. Quality content is a fundamental rule when it comes to creating a web presence.

With these rapid changes, parent companies have more difficulty keeping track of their vast network of dealers/members to see if their network is keeping up with local search and ethical SEO techniques. Would you like to learn more about Google algorithm changes? Tips on how to produce great websites with quality content and white hat SEO techniques? Connect with us!

Have a more specific question? Contact us here.

Maintaining and Building Your Online Reputation

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Chuck Turack

Let’s look at one of the biggest topics in search marketing today… reputation management. Total online reputation management is a crucial and time consuming part of online marketing. It can be done by a small business owner in their spare time or by a professional SEM agency for a large corporation. This article will go over some of the fundamental topics when dealing with total online reputation management.

The Social Update

It is vital for businesses today to be up-to-date and active on major social media outlets. The 3 main players here are:

Facebook
Google+
Twitter

Of course there are many others, but at bare minimum a business needs to be involved on these social mediums.

There are two core actions for each of these social sites that can get your business up-to-speed.

The first thing is to set up your page. You’ll need to add or claim your page. Each site will have a different procedure, but getting through the process is relatively easy. Make sure to fill out all information completely and accurately. Twitter, Google+, and Facebook all have ways to customize your page, I highly recommend this, the reason i it will make your page stand out and also potentially increase conversions. All of these social media sites also have tools to help you connect with people and share information. All businesses need and individual or agency that can administer these accounts.

Next is to STAY ACTIVE! Just making sure you have your page secured with contact information isn’t enough. Google is actively integrating social content into it’s organic search algorithm, so your search ranking will be effected by this as well. Make sure to post updates a least once a week. You can use tools like HootSuite and SproutSocial to make it easier. The key is to make sure you’re posting quality content that informs your users and generates value. From local charities, to office parties, to the holiday weekend, you want to interact and inform your audience. Give your social media accounts individual personality.

Google Places and Other Business Listings

Local business listings with reviews are huge for getting positive business exposure. Yellow Pages has been replaced by the internet, so everyone finds businesses online. Identifying and claiming all of your local business listings is crucial to successful online reputation management. If you don’t control the information that is out there about your business, someone else will try to.

Be Consistent

One primary factor in all of this is to be consistent. It’s very important for the information on each of the websites to match up. All websites are all somewhat interconnected these days. Google can pull data on your business from anywhere and use it in the listing…and they do. So make sure if your name is ‘ACME SEO Company’ on Facebook, make sure it’s not ‘ACME SEO’ or ‘ACME SEO Inc’ on Google Places.

Also be consistent in how often you are interacting with you social network and producing content. Starting a blog you post to once a week. Syndicating your blog posts to your social network, creating an easy way to provide consistent updates across multiple platforms. Hire an agency or assign an employee to do it each week.

Reach Out to Your Customers

Make sure you are reaching out to your customers. Feedback from customers is so valuable, and all of the online tools make it easy today. Here are 6 things you can do to start reaching out:

Respond to Negative Reviews, everyone gets them.
Include links to Google Paces in follow up emails and ask for a review.
Make sure to link to your social outlets and blogs from your website.
Start an email list and periodic email campaigns.
Start a promotion on Facebook.
Ask your customer to ‘like’ you on Facebook OR review you on Yelp! Some won’t, some will.

Create Positive Informative Content

When creating content for all these outlets, make sure you are being positive, informative, and valuable. Think of all of the good things your business does and let people know about it.

Give to a charity each year? That’s an article. Complete a special project with pictures and description? That ‘sa great blog post. Even wishing your customers and fans a “Happy Fourth of July” can be a great thing to do.

Just try to add value in each piece of content you create. Much of this can be done quickly once the accounts are set up. And remember, you can have outside sources create SEO content for you, but the best content is going to come from within. For our customers, make sure you work with us on this, we need your input. BE INVOLVED!

Monitor the Major Outlets

Lastly, make sure that someone is monitoring your online reputation. Do it yourself or have us do it for you, either way its very important. Things change so much in the online world. Every month there seems to be a change in how we are doing something involving SEO and Social, if you leave it for even a few months you can be in trouble. Take these steps and you won’t have any problems.

Backlinks

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Chuck Turack

What are Backlinks?

The simple answer is this: backlinks are a vital part to ensuring your business’s website page ranking is high on Google, Yahoo! or Bing. In even simpler terms, backlinks are incoming links which direct to a website. The more backlinks you have throughout the web, the higher your page rank and traffic.

That is a very straight and to the point definition of backlinks, but there is still much more to backlinks. For an even more precise explanation of backlinks, read on:

Backlinks for traffic: The more visitors to your website the better, nothing new here. Backlinks that focus more on traffic are going to be ones that are linked from a different site. Say for instance, you submit your company’s website to a paid or non-paid business directory. Now, whenever someone finds your entry and clicks on your link, you will be receiving traffic for your website. Other outlets to get these simple inbound links include review sites, online job sites, social media sites (Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc), customers’ websites and much more. The more of these backlinks out there the better for your business and your overall website traffic.

Backlinks for PageRank: Backlinks that are geared toward PageRank are different from backlinks for traffic in that they are focused on ensuring that you rank high on search engines for specific terms. Say for instance, you are a moving company located in Chicago. When someone types in to a search engine “Chicago movers” you will want to be ranked high on that search results page so potential customers visit your website. At Spectrum, we figure out what terms or keywords your customers can rank with. If another person types “Chicago moving companies” you will again hope to rank near the top of Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

But how do backlinks for PageRank work?

Good question. There are a few methods at our disposal to make sure important keywords point your way. One simple source is blog posts. There are countless blogs throughout the web, and decent amount of these blogs give us the ability to increase your PageRank. If you’ve ever commented on a blog post, odds are you’ve used your own name or some online alias. With backlinking for PageRank, instead of using our name, we instead use a keyword. So, to go along with the previous examples, we may comment on the blog with the name “Chicago movers.” In addition to the keyword name, blog sites let you insert a link in to your comment. When that is the case, “Chicago movers” will link to the business’s website or a specific webpage. The keyword “Chicago movers” has just become anchor text. The more of these backlinks across the web, the higher you will rank for the specific keyword terms you use (i.e. the previously used “Chicago movers”).

What about my map ranking?

Ranking high for search results is one thing, having a high ranking on Google, Yahoo! or Bing maps is another. Fortunately, improving these results is not very difficult. Every business should fill out their Google maps listing, but it will take a little bit more effort to rank high against competitors. Citations for Google maps is key in this area. There are many websites out there which let you input your business’s listing. Businesses need to make sure that their address, phone number and website are available on sites such as Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, infoUSA.com, Yelp, Universal Business Listings and much more. Some of these sites may cost money for you to list your business, but the results are well worth it when it comes to your map ranking.

Spectrum is doing all of these things for me, but why am I still not ranking higher than my competitors?

As hard as we work to guarantee your PageRank and traffic, there is still much more to be done, but that is where you come in to the picture. There are many ways that you yourself can become involved in the backlinking process in simple ways that can go far to benefit your business.

What are Ways You Can Help Make Your Backlinking Program Successful?

YOU are your company’s greatest asset to your backlinking program. Rather, your existing professional relationships that can translate into great backlinking opportunities for your business. What are some examples of existing relationships or resources you have that can double as quality backlinking opportunities?

What associations does your company belong to?
What charities have your company donated to or been involved with?
What local organizations is your company a part of?
What client relationships do you have where you could obtain a backlink from their site?
What local schools does your company do business with? Are you an alumni from a local college or university?
What are some local government organizations you are or could get involved with?
Who are your company’s suppliers? Can you obtain a backlink from their website?
Who are your competitors, and what backlinks do they have?
Where do you post career opportunities for your company?
Are you taking advantage of paid and non-paid directories?
What are industry-related or other relevant blogs you can post on?
What are marketing articles we can write about your company and/or industry?
What are video posting opportunities?
What are photo posting opportunities?
Who are your other businesses in the area that you work or partner with from which you can take advantage of backlinking from their sites?

Take some time to really think about the above questions.There are abundant backlinking opportunities through business relationships you have right now. Why not take advantage of what resources you already have?