Friday, December 30, 2011

Promote your content

Content marketing forms the backbone of your SEO and drives most of your online marketing tactics in general. But creating great content is only half of the battle. It doesn’t matter how unique, informative, inspiring or useful your content is if no one sees it. That’s where social networks become incredibly valuable from a marketing perspective. Social media marketing thrives on fresh content and gives your social connections a reason to interact with your social profiles. It keeps your brand top-of-mind and present in their online social lives. Every time you share a piece of your content on a social network that creates a valuable inbound link for your site. Not just ways to drive traffic, these social signals are being used by the search engines to determine the importance of your content. The more times a piece of content is shared across various social networking sites the more valuable it becomes and the better it will rank in the long run. You don’t have to publish the whole blog post to your Facebook wall either. A small snippet and image is enough to attract the attention of your network. It’s a teaser to get them interested and give them a reason to head over to your actual blog/site to read your content.

Seo elements

The final key element of SEO is the acquisition of (votes of confidence) in the form of links from other relevant sites. The search engines are highly sensitive to these and reward them accordingly. Again this is a complex discipline in its own right and many businesses turn to specialist search engine optimisers. However, all of the techniques can be learned from online resources. Essentially linking must be about an exchange of value. One of the simplest options can be to trade links with other sites in an approach. Whilst there is a widely held view that the search engines are placing less weight on such links, this remains a widely accepted practice and really depends on the quality of the page you are linking from, the number of outgoing links it has already and whether you can be contextually linked from a body of relevant content. As an alternative, you can offer something of value to a third party in return for them linking to you, creating a much-coveted inbound only link. Under no circumstances must this be hard cash as buying links is regarded as an unethical “black hat” approach and is easily identified and penalised by the search engines. There is, however, nothing to stop you from offering some relevant free of charge content, many sites struggle to find the time to produce decent content and will welcome this. You should also find that seo optimizacija, over time, as the content on your site is indexed and ranked by the search engines, you will naturally attract links from other sites who consider your content to be useful to their own audience.

Affiliate Internet Marketing

Affiliate internet marketing is a further means by which you may be able to raise your profile in a cost effective way, especially if you negotiate a pay-per-action agreement as opposed to a pay per click. The latter can cost a great deal in popular categories, without necessarily getting results, whereas the former costs only when some agreed result occurs. Once again, there is endless information available on UK affiliate marketing programs and the financial risks can be minimal if properly managed. There are of course, other ways in which to promote your site including press releases and content syndication but the above activity streams represent a reasonably well balanced online marketing mix. Correctly planned and executed, the rewards can be considerable and in today`s pressured environment, although there are many excellent specialist providers in each area, the primary investment is that of time rather than necessarily vital operating capital which means you should always consider managing these activities in-house instead of automatically assuming it should be outsourced. You can even engage the initial help of an internet marketing consultant to create an internet marketing strategy for your business and to train your staff if necessary.

Social Media Marketing

Another broad discipline in its own right, social media marketing has now come of age as a valid element of the online marketing mix. Once again, keywords and decent on-site optimisation are vital in fully leveraging this channel. Other key success factors include identifying the right social media sites for your target demographic, and being seen to add real value. In achieving the latter, search the relevant social media sites, industry blogs and forums for questions relating to your industry, products or services. When you find relevant questions which will often be poorly answered, look for or add rich, relevant content to your own site which addresses the question and, if needed, expands upon it. Then post a summarised but useful answer on the social media site in question with a link to the relevant page on your site for further information. This helps all of the parties involved and establishes you as a credible and helpful industry resource. Although considerable time and effort is required, the brand reputation it can create is significant. You should also find that others will start to link to you as a valuable resource.

Paid Search Marketing

Here you are optimising your presence in the paid results which are listed alongside the natural results for given searches. Paid search Marketing offers the dual advantages of immediacy (in stark contrast with the long haul seen in natural search) and the opportunity to achieve presence for highly competitive terms that may be untenable in natural search. In a pressured economy, paid search campaigns must deliver very clear returns on investment and the costs of such campaigns must be managed in considerable detail. Keyword identification and good on-site optimisation are thus of equal importance in paid search. Understanding the correct balance of terms for which you wish your listing to appear is ever more important and the data you will have previously assimilated in optimising your site will come into play here. Some degree of experimentation is needed and if budgets are under pressure it may also make sense to explore lower volume, lower cost paid advertising options. There are also a number of free or low cost tools that will allow you to manage and track your paid campaigns in considerable detail across multiple paid search providers. The effort you made in optimising and enriching the content of your site will also ensure that you don`t pay a premium cost per click as a result of a so-called “landing page quality score” employed by some of the major paid search engines and will, of course, maximise conversions from the traffic driven via the campaign. One final key point here is to note the ad copy used by any competitors appearing above you in the paid listings. Google and Yahoo Search Marketing, are known to use the click-through rate as a major factor in determining your position in the paid results, rather than solely the maximum price you have agreed to pay per click - so the most effective ads will win.

Seo services

Search Engine Optimisation – From SEO consultancy to fully-managed campaigns, Optillion offers Search Engine Optimisation services covering every aspect of website optimisation.

Search Engine Marketing – Our long-term experience with pay-per-click-advertising and online shopping services means you’ll benefit from a wide range of expertise.

Social Media Marketing – Optillion works with a number of established and emerging social media platforms, and can help you use these to implement dynamic brand and customer relationship management.

Internet marketing services which can easily be managed yourself include the following four principal areas, the importance of each being determined by the sector in which you operate and the degree of competition. Perhaps most importantly for businesses under financial pressure, with the exception of paid search, the primary investment is time rather than money.

Statistics vary but there is a widely held suggestion that some 85% of all traffic to a site will arrive via the search engines, the most dominant of which is Google. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an ever more complex set of disciplines designed to achieve visibility in the `natural` or `organic` - in other words unpaid - search results in Google, Yahoo, Bing together with a range of smaller search engines.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Promote your website

You will finally know what it is you really need to do and what you need to do to develop a strategy to promote your website.

Let us first look at what it is that gets pages ranked in the top of the search engines. Search engines each have their own secret methods and algorithms for ranking websites with the overall mission to get the most relevant content in front of someone searching for particular keywords. There is an endless battle going on between the search engines to bring us the most relevant content and SEO experts trying to find loopholes to get their clients to the top. Although black hat strategies can work for a period of time the clever guys at Google will soon find out what you are up to tighten the loophole and ban you from the search engine. This is known as being Google slapped and can take a long time to recover from.

You need to have keyword rich, quality themed content. This does not mean a load of gobble packed with keywords. Quality means keyword rich content with well worded phrases and paragraphs linked to those keywords. The search engines are getting a lot better at reading pages and they are no longer looking for just keywords but entire meaningful content related to the keywords. Links to your site from other web pages. It is important to have links pointing to your website from other relevant websites. They will have no effect from non-related web pages. Although you will not lose marks for having bad quality links from link farms and other non related websites it will not aid your quest for SEO. Authority sites are the best form of links to have; sites that already rank high in the search engines containing your link will throw a lot of weight. Older sites will tend to rank higher because of the experience and durability factor, as long as they are active sites and updated they will rise in time. Remember that search engines want to deliver the most up-to-date relevant information so keeping it current is important.

A search engine optimization expert cannot assure you of a first page ranking, unless of course he works for the search engines and has control to put you there. All he can promise is his efforts in trying to get you on the first page. Don't believe that an SEO expert can get you 100 Page 5 links for $100. A single link from a site this high up will probably cost you $50 a month. The higher the ranking website you want to link from, the more costly it will be.

First up is the Site Explorer, which takes your URL and returns tons of information: Summary, Top Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Top Pages. Each section is represented on the results page, but you can click on the tabs and get more in-depth info if you like. You can choose the Fresh Index or the Historic Index and run the report on either the domain, the subdomain, or the page itself.

My favorite tool, the Backlink History, also shows up here in the results page but not in its own tab. Now, a note on the Fresh vs. Historic Index: the Fresh index gives you information from a rolling 30 day period and is more, um, fresh, while the Historic index gives you everything in Majestic’s history for a site.

The Domain Information gives you your Referring Domains and External Backlinks, so you can quickly tell if you have a lot of sitewides (if you have 10k backlinks and 10 referring domains, yes, you have a lot of sitewides.)

Your backlinks and referring domains are broken down into educational and governmental and the following information is displayed: Referring IP Addresses, Class C Subnets, Indexed URLs, Images, Nofollow Links, Redirects, Frames, and Deleted Links. You’ll also see a number called the Majestic Million which is a list of the top one million domains as rated by Majestic SEO.

The Backlink History shows your 2 charts: 1 is your external backlinks discovery over the past 12 months and the other is your referring domains discovery over the past 12 months. You can click on these two charts in order to go directly to the Backlink History tool and get more information.

The Top Backlinks area shows the Source URL, Anchor Text, Target URL, and Last Crawl Date.

For competitive analysis, this information can easily be used to see where you stand compared to others in your niche.

For potential link partners, use this data to identify the top pages on a site and go after a link on that page. With so much information, there are truly countless ways of using this data to help better your link building efforts.

Note: I’d love to include a screenshot here but the information you get takes up a large amount of space and I don’t think I can do it justice. Since you can see the Site Explorer for free, even if you can’t get all the detailed data, I’d suggest checking it out for yourself.

Next up is the Backlink History, which has been something I have relied upon many times (especially when clients are trying to convince me that they know their competitors aren’t matching/beating their own link building efforts.) You can again use either the fresh or historic index here and you can compare up to five domains. Currently, subdomains are ignored.