I Do Web Marketing

This is a guest post from Brendan Egan of Simple SEO Group. If you are interested in providing a guest post, please contact me.

Bloggers around the world know the importance of getting their blog and blog posts ranked on search engines.  While some bloggers depend on referral traffic from other websites to deliver their visitors, the vast majority of bloggers receive their traffic from search engines.  In a recent survey, it was estimated that over 65% of blog traffic comes from a search engine.

With these statistics in mind, you might be wondering what you can do to your own blog to make it more search engine friendly.  Here’s 5 great tips to get the most search engine traffic possible on your blog.

1) SEO Plug Ins: One major aspect of SEO is having a good URL, Title, and description for your blog posts.  If you’re using WordPress or really any blogging platform out there, you can search for SEO plug ins that will allow you to control your URL, Title, and other important aspects of your post.  Make sure you optimize these aspects to be reflective of the keywords you want that blog post ranking for.

2) Write Quality Content: This should come without saying but you’d be surprised how many people out there don’t write quality content for their blog.  “Today we are having a sale come in to our store” is not a quality blog post.  While it may be helpful to write a blog post about your sale today, it would be much better to put “Today we are having a sale come in to our store” as your title or headline, and then expand on this by writing a 200-500 word blog post outlining the sale, what you are offering, and providing other details.  Not only will this help with drawing people in but it will also help with SEO.

3) Never Copy/Paste: Duplicate content is like a bullet to the heart these days.  Never go around on the internet and copy/paste content you think is interesting or helpful. If you find something interesting, write a blog post about it on your own and link to it during your blog post so readers can find the original resource if they want.  Providing duplicate content will most definitely hurt your website’s rankings, especially after Google’s most recent updates this year.

4) Tag/Categorize Your Posts: Adding tags and categories to your posts will not only help you with organization, help your readers find what they are looking for, but it will also help with SEO.  Your blog software will insert your tags/categories throughout your post and then will create a page for these tags/categories with other similar blog posts from your blog.  This gives search engines another keyword rich page to rank and will help search engines understand the relationship between multiple blog posts.

5) Find Similar Blogs And Provide Quality Comments: Ok, this has gotten me in trouble before for posting, so let’s be clear: This is NOT comment spamming which is going to a blog and writing “Great post!” then expecting that to get approved with your link.  Go to similar blogs and read their blogs (it might give you ideas for future blogs) and upon reading write a meaningful, relevant comment and enter your URL in the URL field.  As long as you are actually contributing to their blog, they will likely approve your comment which will give you a great new back link.

While following these steps won’t get you to the first page of search results for a competitive keyword like “Stock Market”, it will  get you to the first page for long tail keywords, for example “Learn How To Trade Options In The Stock Market”.  I’ve seen dozens of posts on our blog and our client’s blogs get ranked on the top page of search results just by following these simple tips, and chances are following these suggestions will only take you an extra 10-15 minutes per blog post, but will help drive much more traffic to your blog.

About The Author: Brendan Egan is the owner of Simple SEO Group, a small business online marketing firm specializing in small business SEO. Brendan can be contacted at SimpleSEOGroup.com

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

This is a guest post from Sachin of Web Profits. If you are interested in providing a guest post, please contact me.

Many people do not realise how big of an industry social media marketing, online marketing and other related professions, such as SEO (search engine optimisation) have become. Getting educated for these industries is tricky enough in itself. The best in any industry are those who study, learn and create well before there is somewhere to study. That being said, private institutions seem to be the best place to learn for these careers. It is difficult to find a degree in Facebook, for example. So what does it take to be a part of these exciting new industries?

• User Experience. Knowing social media, knowing all those sites, and having your own experience is the best way to know anything to do with online marketing. Unlike many other media industries, the options, strategies and methods are varied, many and complex. The best way to understand what is going on is to be a part of it. Your own research and reading will take you further than most studies.

• Studies. Online marketing could be described as the latest version of public relations – just it is on a very big scale. If you are looking for some background or foundation studies to support your career move, a degree in communications is worth a look at. There are those private institutions that are already developing more specialised study programs. As per usual, the USA is leading the way.

• Working Style. Anyone who works in media, or any other creative type industry knows there are long hours. At the same time, there are long hours in anything we want to do well in. We thought computers were going to give us more free time. That is obviously not the case. In other words, it is not the hours that are the issue. Working in a creative environment takes a fresh and open attitude towards working. Those who work best in these industries know a flower only grows when it is given water and sunshine. Encouragement and positivity will allow you and everyone else to get the most out of what they do. It is not always pressure that delivers, especially when we are talking about creativity.

• Getting Experience. There are so many fields we can apply to online marketing, and particularly social media marketing. Making the switch to these new industries might not be as difficult as you think. Spending 3 years to get a new degree might not be a sensible option in a field that is so new and fresh. Facebook marketing did not exist only a few years ago. It might just be your communication skills and your current following that make all the difference. Again, user experience and self-education are still the best ways to go.

Those who specialise in SEO (search engine optimisation) are the true online marketers. This is actually the basis of many of the other fields of online marketing. Social media marketing, Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing and now, Google+ marketing are areas those professionals have included in their portfolios. You might have more knowledge than you think. Careers come and go, but you can be assured, online marketing is here to stay.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

This is an update to the original list I wrote a couple of years ago. I felt it was necessary to update this list as a number of statistics and sources are outdated from that post. So, without further ado, here is the 2011 version of the top 10 reasons to use SEO:

#10 – According to data from Search Engine Land, there are 2 million search queries performed per minute on Google. A total of 98.8 billion search queries are performed across Google, Yahoo, and Bing in a given month. 40% of queries are local searches.

#9 – According to Avinash Kaushik of Google, 14% of clicks on a search results page are on PPC ads, while 86% of clicks are on natural search result listings.

#8 – 9 out of 10 people use a search engine when looking for products and services.

#7 – Over a quarter (27 percent) of small businesses have a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan in place, up from 19 percent a year ago. It is only going to get more competitive!

#6 – Online marketing is currently 13.3% of all total advertising spend.

#5 – Online advertising spend expected to be $36.3 billion by 2014 and has seen an average of 10% growth year over year.

#4 – Forrester estimates that both US online retail will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion in 2015.

#3 – Everything is measureable, since you can utilize tools like Google Analytics.

#2 – Your website is a virtual salesman that works 24/7/365, no sick days or paid time off.

#1 – Best way to initiate a direct response as it is the only form of marketing that puts you in front of targeted prospective customers who are looking exactly for what you offer at a point when they are ready to buy.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series, we talked about how to measure your online marketing efforts and specifically what metrics and tools you should be working with for your SEO and social media campaigns. But in order for this information to be meaningful, you need a concrete strategy with clearly defined goals that will drive your marketing decisions.

Measuring return on investment in the online marketing world necessitates a clear understanding of what you expect from your efforts. The measuring we’ve talked about previously is really the final step of the process. Let’s take a look at what comes before metrics analysis in order to define success.

1. Define Goals

Of course, your big picture goals will be to attract customers and win conversions, but those aren’t specific enough to be helpful in the creation of your marketing strategy. Break these big goals down into smaller increments such as:

• Increase Twitter retweets by 2%
• Offer informative content to encourage retweets
• Create a new blog post each week

Notice how this list begins with the general goal of increasing retweets and funnels down to the specific, actionable goal of creating new content.

2. Create Content

Content creation is the proverbial horse that must come before the cart of social media or SEO promotion. Your promotion efforts will fail miserably if they’re not undergirded by solid content creation. Well written content places you in a position of trust and gives people a reason to keep visiting your site and recommending you to friends. Even Google understands the important of regularly updated content and will give priority in the SERPs to websites that update frequently. Start by researching keywords that your target audience is searching for and focusing on what problems you can solve for your readers.

3. Promote Content

With your content creation strategy underway, you can focus on promotion efforts through SEO and social media. Use search engine optimization and social media venues to keep your content in front of your target audience. Remember that the better your content, the more likely your followers will be to share it with their friends, generating greater interest and brand recognition for you.

4. Measure Success

This is where you come full circle and can begin to measure the results of your online marketing strategy. The metrics we talked about in previous posts will show you how effective your strategy is, giving you the information you need to make educated changes based on measurable results.

What do YOU think? Anything I may have overlooked? Feel free to share some of your own success stories!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Having discussed the metrics and tools best suited to understanding the success of your SEO strategy in Part Two of this series, it’s time now to turn our attention to social media. You can approach social media ROI by seeking to determine how well your customers are engaging with you through various outlets.

Social Media Metrics to Follow

The success of your social media strategy depends on how well your target audience interacts with you. You can get a feel for customer engagement using the following key metrics:

●      Facebook Likes—While it’s true that there are many ways to determine how effective your Facebook campaign is, the like button is a great place to start. If your customers “like” your page, that means they’re taking the time to read what you’re posting, they’re giving it some thought, and they’re expressing their approval.

●      Re-tweets—The re-tweet tells you that your Twitter followers have engaged with your content enough to share it with their friends. Overall, re-tweets are more important than the number of followers you have since they tell you who is engaging with your content.

●      Google +—Google + offers many of the same benefits as Facebook, but with a few new features. Google + enables you to create circles, segmenting your friend group so that you can designate particular content for particular circles. It also incorporates a video chat feature and content gathering option (similar to an RSS feed). While Google + is still very much in its infancy stage, marketers have already seen great potential for reaching a particular audience with a targeted message.

Start monitoring your Google + account by using Google Analytics to watch Google + generated website traffic as well as clicks and actions.

●      Overall Mentions—Keeping track of your overall brand mentions is the best way to determine how well your branding strategy is working for you. Find out what people are saying about your brand using the following tools:

○    Google Alerts—Setup brand related keyword and phrase alerts and receive a daily report of the overall mentions you receive in a variety of categories including news, blogs, web, and video.

○    HootSuite—A little more sophisticated than Google Alerts, HootSuite is a full social media management tool that allows you to monitor your brand mentions as well as organize them and filter them so the results are more usable, and you can also schedule post across various networks. Free version allows you to monitor up to 5 accounts!

Monitoring your social media metrics along with your SEO effectiveness will give you a good grasp of how well your online marketing efforts are reaching your intended audience. In the next post, we’ll take a look at how to bring all this information together as you formulate your best online marketing strategy.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

As we discussed in Part One of this series, measuring the success of your online marketing strategy depends on understanding the differences between ROI in traditional marketing and ROI in the online world. When it comes to your SEO strategy, your ultimate goal is of course generating traffic that leads to conversions, but in order to truly gauge the effectiveness of your campaign, you’ll need to understand the dynamics that go into reaching that goal. Analytics programs offer a lot of data, but sometimes it can all be overwhelming. Let’s start by discussing what metrics you should be watching.

Metrics That Determine SEO Success

The most important metrics in determining SEO success revolve around rankings and customer interaction with your site. Keep an eye on the following metrics to see how well your campaign performs:

• Rankings—Keep an eye on rankings in all the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to determine whether your target audience can find you.
• Website Traffic—Monitor who is visiting your site and where they’re coming from to find out whether your SEO strategy is bringing people in.
• Bounce Rates—How many people enter and leave your site without ever clicking? Find out whether your SEO strategy is targeting the right audience by tracking bounce rate.
• Page Load Time—If your page takes too long to load, you’ll lose a significant portion of visitors before they ever see your site. Monitor your load time in order to tweak hefty site elements when needed.
• Pages Visited—Does your conversion funnel operate as you intend it too? Does your SEO strategy target the audience most interested in what you have to offer? Find out by watching which pages your visitors view.

SEO Analytics Tools

With your short list of SEO metrics in hand, the next step is to choose an analytics tool that will make it easy to monitor those metrics. Here are the best of the bunch:

Google Analytics—Probably the best free analytics tool available, Google Analytics lets you segment, customize, and track your website metrics in order to hone your online marketing strategy strategy.

Google Webmaster Tools—View reports detailing your site’s visibility on Google as well as your average search engine ranking.

Authority Labs—Follow overall rankings and keyword data with this fully automated tool.

In Part 3 of this series, we are going to look at some social media metrics you should be monitoring as well as some tools that will help with the management of your social media accounts.

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Recently, I have been on a landing page generation machine. I recently launched 11 landing pages, and have another 15 in the works. I am in the process of creating content for these landing pages, while one of my teammates at SEORCHERS works on building them out. It can be a rather large and daunting task if you are doing it all, so I have become a huge fan of delegation.

As online marketing has become more integrated into company marketing strategies, many marketers have begun facing tough questions such as “How much revenue does this initiative bring in?” and “What results can you show me from the social media strategy we began implementing last month?” While these seem like straightforward questions from a big picture perspective, they can actually be tough to answer down on the ground. So often, the results we see aren’t couched in dollars and cents, at least not right away. That’s why it’s important to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether or not it’s producing the results you want.

Let’s Dig a Little Deeper

In this series of articles, we’ll be taking a look at how you can get answers to the above questions. More importantly, we’ll discover what ROI actually means in the online marketing realm and how you can measure it concretely. For now, you just need to know that ROI for your online marketing strategy can take many different forms including conversions, leads, contacts, and customer relationships. In order to calculate these sometimes elusive metrics, you’ll also need to know how to gather data using analytics tools, what individual elements you should be monitoring, and what tools will give you the best results.

In Part Two of this series, we’ll discuss what metrics will give you the information you need for your SEO initiative and we’ll take a look at some of the tools available to keep you on track. Part Three will tackle social media metrics and tools. And in Part Four, we’ll talk about how to put all that information together to keep your online marketing strategy performing at its best.

What You Can Expect To See

The most important thing monitoring your metrics will do for you is show you whether you’re meeting your goals. Creating a website that brings in no traffic or a Twitter account that generates no leads does nothing for your company. That’s obvious, but what may not be so obvious is whether the methods you’re currently using are doing what you think they are. Knowing what metrics to watch and what tools will be your best eyes will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your online marketing strategy, enabling you to tweak what needs tweaking and scrap what needs scrapping. And if your strategy is bringing in more customers than ever before, you’ll have something concrete to celebrate.

This is the first of a four part series. I’ll be rolling out Parts 2 (SEO Metrics and Tools) and 3 (Social Media Metrics and Tools) next week and Part 4 (Bringing it all together) over the course of the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Two milestone projects for me are complete! I’m excited to share with my readers and also would like any feed back!

#1 Redesigned This Blog

It has been a long time coming, in fact a total renovation of this blog has been on my to do list for over a year and a half, but the day has finally come. Everything has been cleaned up. If you’ve been to this blog in the past, then you will notice a major change. It is no longer so heavily focused on my company, but more about you, my fellow web marketers and those interested in learning about web marketing. That said, I still generate quite a few leads through this blog, so I’ve gone in and prettied up the About page (linked here: SEO Consulting) for that very reason. I wanted to go with a more personable approach, and I feel this new design does just that!

# 2 My Side Project is Launched

This blog has been a fairly popular place for other web marketers, and I want to continue to grow that community so we can all share and learn from each other. With that idea in mind, I started up a side project called Internet Marketing News Daily. Every day I end up skimming through hundreds of blog posts to find the 10-15 or so that really pique my interest. I know there is a ton of fluff in the internet marketing arena, so I wanted to cut out the fat and compile a daily roundup of the latest happenings in the internet marketing industry. These are blog posts that I have personally read, and know you will find value just in the time saved! I think you’ll enjoy the daily humor at the end of them all as well.

Let me know what you think!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Managing your Twitter followers can be a headache, but with Tweepi, you can perform both simple and complex management tasks with the click of a button. Tweepi’s distinguishing factor is that it allows you to view stats about your followers in spreadsheet format, enabling you to sort and search on any number of criteria: the promotional geekiness.

Basic Overview
As self-described geeks, Tweepi offers four “geeky” tools to help you keep your Twitter account up to date.

• Flush—This tool lets you find the people you follow who haven’t followed you back. Think of it as a geeky way to pay back the people who have insulted you by not reciprocating your follow. While this might be a fun tool for personal interactions, businesses may not gain much from it.
• Reciprocate—The best way to make sure you don’t get Flushed, Reciprocate enables you to find and follow the people who have followed you but who are not yet on your follow list. Again, this may not be all that useful for businesses.
• Cleanup—This is where the tools starts getting fun for businesses. Cleanup allows you to view all of your contacts in list format along with a broad range of stats for each one. Sort based on number of tweets, date of last tweet, link-to-tweet ratio, or any number of other stats and cleanup your list based on hard data.
• Follow—Finally, the Follow tool enables you to type in a user and view all of his followers along with activity stats. It’s a great way to beef up your lists, but unfortunately doesn’t allow you to flip the equation in order to see who a particular user is following.

Cool Functions

While there are a host of Twitter management tools out there, Tweepi does have a few functions that set it apart. First and most obvious is the stats feature. Tweepi allows you to organize your follower lists the geeky way, based on activity stats and hard data. Another feature we like is the Safelist button. Safelist allows you to place a lock on a particular follower so you don’t accidentally follow or unfollow (we’ve all experienced the headaches that can cause). Finally, we love the customizability of stats. Hide or reveal columns and followers at will so that only the information you’re currently evaluating appears on screen.

Versions
Get started with Tweepi using their free package. If you like what you see, you can upgrade to silver or platinum packages which offer greater options and more features for a monthly fee.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

This is a guest post from Sachin of Web Profits.

Online marketing is an art form, a science, and is closely related to the basic principles of SEO. The marketing industry has been having a hard time getting a grip on this very tricky market, and the reasons are all too obvious. The basic process of getting sales isn’t well understood. Part of the trouble is that marketing online is marketing to an entirely different buying pattern based on external information sources.

The fact is that most online marketing is still being done using Old Media techniques, trying to transfer TV advertising and marketing methods to the internet. It’s a bit like trying to sell sand to people living in the Sahara. The net is full of advertising and marketing materials which are strenuously avoided. Most people are quite happy to ditch a web page rather than put up with irritating materials.

There’s a good reason for the resistance. Wading through marketing materials can be a colossal waste of time. When people are actually trying to buy something, they don’t go running to the nearest ad. They go looking for information about the products and services they want. They can evaluate any number of choices very easily.

This is the only market in the world where the consumer is more likely to be better informed than the market itself. People learn very quickly how to find the information they need about things they really want to buy. There is such a thing as impulse buying online, but that’s equally selective, and when it’s so easy to do a bit of research while shopping, that’s what happens.

What sells, an overview

Ironically enough in the Information Age, what sells is information. People are quite happy to read through any useful information and get facts. They’re a lot more receptive to meaningful information about products and services than they are to hype of any kind.

For example:

• Tell someone you’ve got a great new app that will cure their acne, improve their love life and make them 20 years younger, and nobody will pay the slightest attention.
• Tell someone you’ve got a new app that can do their business for them, and you’ll be snowed under with orders, the minute people can check it out, see how it works, and evaluate it. That’s information. Anything else is nothing.

What marketers need to install into their craniums is that their materials are a click away from oblivion in this environment. Nobody cares what the advertiser thinks of their own product. The mere fact that someone who may or may not exist and is living in a tree in Wisconsin likes it isn’t overly persuasive, either.

The “Why” factor

Internet marketing has its own rationales. The question marketers should be asking themselves is “Why would anyone want to buy this product?”, because that’s exactly what the consumers will be asking themselves. Online marketing must relate to information values, not hype, to sell.

The “Why” factor is the real issue for marketers. If you expect people to spend money, that endangered species in anyone’s life, they must have a reason. Concentrate on that, and you’ll sell, and sell well.

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.