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Content is King – SEO Best Practices

If you want your Website to rank high on major search engines such as Google, your best shot is to develop a list of targeted keywords and then build specific WebPages with content focusing on these keywords.  SEO is done best before the Webpage is built; first you develop the strategy then implement by developing a targeted Webpage focused on your targeted keywords.

Optimize your Website for Local Search – Part 2

Part 1 of this installment focused on local business listings and optimizing your Pay per Click campaigns to maximize your investment in targeting local search.  Both strategies laid out in Part 1 should be fairly easy to accomplish; Part 2 is a more complicated and time consuming strategy to maximize your investment in targeting local search.

Optimize your Website for Local Search – Part 1

Chances are as a small business or an entrepreneur the products or services that you offer are targeted to a local area.  When this is the case it is very important to develop your search engine optimization strategy with a plan to attract localized searches.  If you are a pizza shop in Philadelphia it makes logical sense to target searches of people looking for a pizza shop in Philadelphia or if you’re a lawyer in New York it is logical to target searches looking for a lawyer in New York and not someone looking for a lawyer in California. 

SEO – Optimize Your Blog for High Search Engine Rankings

One of the primary reasons to operate and maintain a blog about your industry is to gain high search engine rankings to assist you in driving targeted potential customers and clients to your business.

Because blogs are updated on a daily or weekly basis they naturally have an advantage over static Websites or Websites that rarely has content changes or additional content. Blogs also naturally receive better rankings because blog posts typically include lot of targeted keywords that helps Google rank your blog for specific targeted keyword phrases.

Even though a blog will naturally gain better rankings, there are still optimization techniques that will assist in gaining high Google and other major search engine rankings. The two biggest blogging sites are WordPress and Blogger. Both blogging sites give you the flexibility to optimize your blog for high search engine ranking.

From an optimization standpoint, blogs are not very different from Websites. Keyword driven content and incoming relevant links are still keys to your SEO success. The competitive advantage of a blog is from the frequency of keyword driven postings. By posting daily or multiple times per week, Google and other search engines will quickly take notice and index and rank your blog.

Some Blog Optimization Tips:

• Write an interesting title that correctly describes your blog post.  Your title should captivate the user to read more and possibly attract other Website operators to link to your blog post.
  

• Try to use the most important blog keywords in the title - while it may be hard to always do this, by keeping the title related to the topic, your blog will always be relevant and assists Search Engines in ranking your Website for those targeted terms.

• Utilize the H1 tags - Your blog editor should allow for custom templates, so be sure to stylize your blog title in the H1 tags.  H1 tags is a specific style that search engines recognize as a title to the page and the importance of the keywords within this title

• Turn on the feature that allows you to control the name of the sub directory that the post exists within.  Use your most important 2 or 3 word keyword phrase, placing a dash between each word. (professional-financial-services)

• Make sure the name of the webpage matches your blog post title; this is referred to as URL Rewritten Permalinks.  In addition, most blogging platforms will allow you to add an SEO widget that will assist in the optimization of your blog pages.

• Don't forget about your archives.  They are full of great keyword driven content that will be picked up by search engines.  Make sure these are always turned on and linked from your homepage.

• Link your blog from your corporate Website and any sister sites.  Also invite other relevant Websites to trade links with your blog to increase your incoming links.

Again, the key to a successful search engine optimized blog is frequent keyword driven postings.  It may not be necessary to write up a full article every time you post, two paragraphs and maybe some resource links is all you typically need.  One trick is to split a larger blog post into two sections (part 1 & part 2).  Posts the first part one day, and then post the second part the next day.  This will increase the frequency of your blog posts without a lot of additional work.

  

Article written by Jason Lomberg, SEO Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs

 

 

 

Advanced SEO Best Practices– Keyword Driven URL Structure

It is an enormous advantage to develop your search engine optimization strategy before the development of your Website.  Best practices are to do your keyword research then develop your Website based on these results.  Each Webpage should have its own SEO strategy based on targeted keyword phrases.  Your competitive advantage is in developing  your URL structure to match the keyword strategy for that page.  

URL structure strategy includes three parts:

1.    Domain Name Strategy (www.yourcompany.com). 
This is the hardest part to control; but if possible you are better off choosing a domain name that includes your targeted keyword phrases instead of your company name.  You can purchase your company name or brand as a second domain and point that domain to your Website. For example if you are a marketing company in Boston, from an SEO perspective it is better to use the domain www.boston-marketing-company.com instead of www.yourcompany.com.  It does make sense to also purchase www. yourcompany.com and point that domain to www.boston-marketing-company.com.  Google and the major search engines consider a dash (-) a space in the URL.  Google sees www.boston-marketing-company.com as “boston marketing company”.  You will gain a competitive advantage when a person on Google searches under a phrase such as “marketing company Boston”.

2.    Subdirectory  Strategy (/subdirectoryname/)

A keyword driven subdirectory can be very beneficial in gaining high search engine rankings for selected keyword phrases. This is easy for a Web developer to implement into your Website but it is best to integrate into your Website while it is being developed and not changed later. A subdirectory is a folder that you can place files into and this will become part of your URL; www.yourcompany.com/subdirectory/pagename.html. The concept is to name the subdirectory using a targeted keyword phrase that describes that Webpage or group of WebPages.

 

 Let’s use the example of a Marketing company located in Boston.  You market a variety of marketing services on your Website with each service on its own Webpage.  The marketing services WebPage should be put into a directory call “marketing-services-boston”.  Google sees these keywords in your URL and will help you rank higher when people search under those terms such as “marketing services in Boston”. Utilizing the domain and subdirectory strategies your URL should look like this; "www.boston-marketing-company.com/marketing-services-boston.com/pagename.html"

  

  

 

3.    Page Name Strategy (pagename.html)

Of the threes URL strategies your page name strategy is the most important and the easiest to control.  To gain high search engine rankings for your targeted keyword phrases it is critical to name the page using the keywords that best describe that Webpage.

 

Let’s get back to the Marketing Company in Boston example.  One of your services is Public Relations and you want to attain high search engine rankings for anyone searching for Public Relations on the major search engines.  Best practices are to name that Webpage describing the content and the keyword target of that Webpage.  In this case the suggested page name would be “public-relations-boston.html”.  Another example would be is if you offer Internet Marketing services, the page name should similar to “internet-marketing-boston.html”.

 

 

 

Utilizing the three URL strategies laid out above your Public Relations focused Webpage should have a URL similar to “www.boston-marketing-company.com/marketing-services-boston/public-relations-boston.html”.  That URL or a similar URL will give your Public Relations Webpage a competitive advantage against competitors without a similar URL structure when a person searches “public relations in Boston”.  Obviously  you still have to do all the typical SEO techniques including a lot of linking but a keyword driven URL will increase your chance of being found on Google and the other major search engines.

 

Jason Lomberg is the SEO Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs.  Please stay tuned for more SEO strategy related posts

Search Engine Optimization – Properly Utilizing Title Tags

When optimizing your Website for high search engine rankings, targeted search engines such as Google and Bing, the first step is writing keyword driven Meta title tags.  This title tag is the title on the top left of your browser window.  Search engines put a lot of weight on these titles when ranking your Website.  Many Websites utilize the company name or the name of that Webpage as the page title which is typically a mistake if you want to rank that Webpage for targeted keyword phrases. Even if you do not execute any other types of optimization in your WebPages, keyword driven title tags will help you rank your Website in a higher position.

The Meta title tag serves two purposes in relation to search engines.

1. When a searcher searches keywords that are in your title tag you will rank higher for those keywords.  Google’s number one focus is to give the searcher relevant Websites to choose from that is most closely related to their search.  Google assumes your title tag describes the Webpage and uses that information in deciding where to rank that Webpage.
2. The clickable title of your search engine listing is your title tag for that page.  Unless you’re a known brand your company name serves no purpose here.  It is better to display text that is closely related to the searcher.  For example if someone is searching for a” Bankruptcy Lawyer in Philadelphia” a Website with a title of Philadelphia Bankruptcy Lawyer or Bankruptcy Lawyer in Philadelphia is much more relevant to the searcher then “J & J Law Firm” and will increase the chance of your site being visited from that search.
   

Title Tag Best Practices

• Research your keywords and make sure these are keywords that people are searching. I personally prefer to use multiple tools for this process.  A free tool that works well for keyword research is SEO Book
• Try to be somewhat specific in the keywords you target, very general keywords are very competitive.  For example instead of targeting the keyword “lawyer”, target “Philadelphia bankruptcy lawyer”.  By targeting that phrase you are actually targeting four searchable phrases in one shot; “Philadelphia bankruptcy lawyer”, “bankruptcy lawyer”, “Philadelphia lawyer” and “lawyer”.
• If possible utilize the most important keyword words two times in the title but no more than twice.  For example, “Philadelphia Bankruptcy Lawyer – Bankruptcy Lawyer in Philadelphia”
• Limit your title tag to 70 or fewer characters, including spaces.  If you go over the 70 character limit it won’t hurt your rankings but only the first 70 characters are displayed on Google’s search results.  Also it is possible that characters after the 70 character limit will carry less weight in your ranking.
• Capitalize the first letter of each word.
•  Instead of using the word “and” (takes up space) you can use a “-“ or “|”.  Instead of “Serving Philadelphia and Delaware” you can use “Serving Philadelphia | Delaware”
• Google puts more weight on the left most words of the title tag.
• Your title tag should be focused on the content of that Webpage.  If the Webpage describes a bankruptcy lawyer then bankruptcy lawyer should be in the title and not divorce lawyer.

Keep in mind that by properly writing your title tags does not mean you will magically appear at the top of Google rankings for many targeted keyword phrases. In some cases, typically non-competitive keyword phrases, this will give you a major boost in your rankings.  To be truly successful you need keyword dense webpage copy and a link building strategy among other factors in addition to targeted keyword driven titles.

Stay tuned for future blog posts on how to better rank your Website with SEO.   Have you done a title tag review of your Web site?  How does it stack up against these guidelines?

Jason Lomberg is an SEO Strategist with Team and a Dream

25 Nearly Free Ways to Market your Business

 

Our 15 DIY PR post generated a lot of buzz around executing PR and marketing ideas on the cheap. In response to it, (and thanks to Michael Basinet's recommendation) we've decided to follow up with another post on more ideas around marketing your business for almost nothing. Read on!

 

1. Design creative business cards. Most business cards are thrown in a pile or discarded after a meeting or networking event. Why not create a card someone will use? Or one they're sure to remember?  This post from creativebits showcases some great ideas!

 

2. Do-It-Yourself SEO. Submit your site to major search engines and indexes. Click here for a great post on where to find the URLs and tips on submitting your site the right way. Also, check out our previous post on 25 Free (and Useful) SEO Tools.

 

3. Take a free online marketing course. On a previous post, we highlighted 99 free business and entrepreneurship classes of which nine pertained to marketing. Invest some time in taking the course and apply some of the methods for your business.

 

 

4. Use an ad exchange network to exchange links with someone. One I've heard a lot about is adgridwork.com. While we haven't tried it yet, it allows you to add your site to their network for free. Your ad is displayed in relevant sites while you display an ad on your site. Basically, you're exchanging ads from one site to another. It's a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site.

 

 

 

5. Give back to your community. A great way to give back, promote your business, and feel good about yourself is to volunteer in your area. Help out at a local homeless shelter or church. You'll be amazed at the great connections you'll make.  If you're not sure of how to find these events or what to do, visit VolunteerMatch and search for opportunities near you.

 

6. Use CafePress. Create your own pens, mugs, notebooks, T-shirts, etc. and give them away. It's an inexpensive way to have your prospect/client/user be surrounded by your branding. The more useful the item, the better. Save money and buy them in bulk.

 

7. Start an incentive program. What better way to attract users than to ask current or former users/clients to refer you to someone. Offer an incentive for motivation. It could be something you make with your branding on it using CafePress. It could also be your own product/service for free or at a discount - it doesn't hurt tying it back to your business!

 

8. Offer something for free. For example, we offer a free one-hour consultation (though it typically lasts longer) with early-stage internet startups looking for execution support. This consultation is one way we attract prospects. The objective here is to convert the visitors to your site into users or to get them to contact you in some way. What can you do in your business that has the same effect? Some ideas include providing them with a free subscription for a short period of time to your site, free shipping on purchases for a limited time, etc.

 

9. Social Media Outreach. There are tons of free buzz-building tactics you can employ. It's also a great way to stay abreast of the latest trends on your industry while building credibility for yourself and your business. Some methods include:

• Scouring the blogosphere and other social networks for relevant posts, groups, etc. and contributing valuable relevant content (being careful not to SPAM!).
• Creating your own groups and discussions around your product/service. Start a conversation with your customers, gain valuable feedback, and drive traffic to your site.

10. Create a Squidoo Lens. Squidoo basically allows you to create your own online page. Highlight the benefits of your service or showcase your expertise in an area related to your field. You can also point to photos on Flickr, Google maps, your blog, eBay auctions, YouTube, etc. Squidoo also shares their advertising revenue with you. Check out our Cheap Revolution page for additional ideas.