Category : Internet Marketing
How to Choose the Right SEO Strategy
We have talked about the importance of SEO maintenance previously about how you need a monthly active SEO plan to stay ahead of competition and rank high on the search engine results page (SERP). To help you choose the right SEO strategy, we will focus on what should be included in the SEO maintenance plan.
- Rank Reports – It is important to have a rank report run so you can monitor your rankings on the SERP. There could be fluctuations due to actions done by your competitor, new sites being added, and changes in the search engine algorithms. Rank reports are a must for a SEO strategy.
- Keyword Research – Competitors can try to outrank you for different keywords or long tail phrases. This means that keywords that you used to rank high for might not be optimal for you to appear on the SERP. Some keywords receive more traffic while some receive less. With the keyword research in your SEO strategy, you can determine what keyword phrases will work best for you – such as whether to rank well on high traffic keywords or target niche ones with possible better conversion rates.
- Competitive Analysis – A competitive analysis in a SEO strategy provides you with a summary of where your competitors are in terms of their SEO efforts. You can see how your competitors are ranking for your keywords and other site elements. Also what are they factors contributing to them ranking well on the SERP. Through that, you can decide the direction of your SEO efforts in order to compete. Factors that come into play include inbound links, meta tags and keyword density, and seo content.
- SEO Copywriting – It is important that your SEO strategy includes SEO copywriting because of the need for fresh content. It is important that new pages or articles are added on a regular basis as it can help expand your reach with more keywords and ways your visitors can find you. Having fresh content is also one of the important SEO ranking factors.
We have outlined the components of what we think is important for SEO maintenance, thus should be included in a SEO strategy. There are other components that are important, such as link building and social media—as outlined in SEO ranking factors. Let Smart Solutions come up with a customized active SEO strategy for you. Contact us now to find out how we can help your business.
Timing Twitter | Scheduling Tweets Ahead of Time
If you are in charge of managing a business Twitter account, you know how time consuming the service can be. Professionals suggested that you tweet several times a day, but every time you log into Twitter, you end up spending time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Frankly, you don’t have the time to stare at Twitter all day. The minutes that you spend on the site are taking away from other important projects, and even though it’s beneficial—it isn’t necessary.
Scheduling Twitter updates is an important aspect of social media marketing. If you don’t have a grasp on how to do it—or a service to help you, you are losing valuable time. We’ve listed a few of the basics below, to help you get started with scheduling Twitter.
Finding a Twitter Scheduler
If you don’t have a Twitter scheduler in use already, than it’s time to start looking into the different options available. There are several great services, and we’ve listed a couple of our favorites here:
This is the tweet scheduling service that we use, because you can simply log in with your Twitter account, and you’re ready to schedule. You don’t have to remember another password! It’s as simple as it gets, though, so you won’t have any other feature but the scheduling.
This is probably the most popular system for scheduling Twitter updates. It comes with a lot of other features other than scheduling though, so if you’re looking just to schedule, this service might overwhelm you. You can also monitor your other social networks on Hootsuite—so it isn’t strictly Twitter.
TweetDeck has actually been acquired by Twitter. It’s a program that you can download right to your desktop, program tweets, look at mentions and messages, and monitor other social media platforms, as well.
This service is a lot like Twuffer, but you can also use it for Facebook. We don’t recommend using a scheduling service for Facebook, but it’s an option you have with this website. You can log in straight through your Twitter profile—no extra password to remember—but it’s not the service we chose, because it isn’t as pleasant to look at as Twuffer is. If you’re scheduling tweets as much as we do, you need a site that’s easy on the eyes.
Scheduling Twitter Updates | Putting Together a Twitter Schedule
Once you’re set up with a Twitter scheduler, you’re going to want to figure out a plan:
- How many times will you tweet a day?
- How many links, mentions and hashtags?
- What time of day will you schedule Twitter updates for?
- How often will you load tweets into your Twitter scheduler?
You can save a lot of time by scheduling twitter updates, and it’s something we suggest for all of our clients. However, sometimes it’s still too overwhelming to put together a Twitter schedule and keep your business Twitter account updated. If you want to save some time and stress, give us a call about our Twitter monitoring services.
Internet Marketing Tools for Your Business
There is a wide variety of internet marketing tools for your SEO and social media needs. Some internet marketing tools are free, some are paid. So how do you pick the best internet marketing tool for your business?
At the Bend WebCAM 2011 conference, Taylor Pratt from Raven Tools presented Tools of the Trade, which covers an array of paid and free internet marketing tools. The key features of any tool should help you with the following:
- Save Time: If a paid tool saves you several hours per day, sometimes paying $150 per month might well be worth it.
- Centralize Data: Some internet marketing tools provide the ability to keep all your information in one location, in an organized manner.
- Collaborate: A good internet marketing tool would allow the ability for users to collaborate.
- Reliable: This would possibly be the most important aspect. Your internet marketing tool needs to be reliable.
There are the traditional tools that help with keyword research, content management, social media management, link management and link research. However, there are also the non-traditional tools that people need to look out for. These non-traditional tools help with microdata, monitoring, usability, and technical analysis.
Microdata
Microdata help search engines and spiders understand the information on the website. It is important to have clean code so that information can be processed quicker and better.
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Online and Social Media Monitoring
The online and social media monitoring tools help you keep track of what is being said about your business, online—good or bad. By keeping track of the positive and negative, you know what your customers like or dislike about your business, and what can be done to improve.
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Usability Testing Tools
Websites have to be user friendly and provides information within reach of visitors. If visitors do not know where to click or find it hard to navigate, it really defeats the purpose of having a website. There are some usability testing tools that help you with increasing the usability of your website.
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Technical Analysis
A good technical analysis tool would help with evaluating code, determine if a website has a search-friendly design, and helps with IA setup.
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Writing SEO Content for Your Website
Writing for the Internet can be difficult. Writing SEO content is even harder. Readers are getting more demanding—speed, ease and informative. Studies have shown that readers skim. When skim readers read an article, they expect content to be short and straight to the point. Don’t expect the reader to stay long if you beat around the bush. Now, the challenge is to balance good content with SEO.
Writing for the Web
It is important for your website to be informative. If you don’t offer readers what they want, they can leave quickly with a simple click of the mouse. How do you get readers to stay?
Short and Sweet: Don’t use fancy words to try to sound more profound when a simple word will do. If readers get confused, they will not read your content. Allow your content to flow smoothly so readers enjoy reading and stay longer on your website.
Paragraphs: I have seen websites that have pages and pages of information with no paragraphs. Paragraphs help readers understand your writing better through organized thoughts. When there is a new paragraph, it is a signal to the reader that the topic is either being developed or that the writer is moving onto another discussion.
Active vs Passive: The active voice is shorter, more assertive and easier to understand. Passive usually requires more cognitive effort from the reader—this stresses the reader and forces them to leave. For example, take a look at “My hard work was appreciated by my boss” (passive) and “My boss appreciated my hard work” (active). Which requires less effort to understand?
Scannable text: As I mentioned earlier, many are skim readers. Readers scan a page to find answers to their questions. It also helps them understand the topic better. When writing for the web, create text that is scannable—headers, bold, and bullet points.
SEO Copywriting
It is important to create search engine friendly content to allow your website to rank well on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). To rank well, you need to have the following:
Well-researched keywords: You need to understand keyword research and select the ones that can help you rank. By ranking well, visitors can find your site, leading to conversions. Keywords need to be relevant to the content on your page—search engines look at this when ranking your website. This also helps readers understand your content better.
Keyword rich content: Through the effective use of keywords throughout your content, search engines can rank you better. However, a website that is covered with nothing but keywords does not provide readers with the information that they need. You are merely optimizing your site for robots—this defeats the purpose of having a website. Good SEO copywriting involves the proper use of keywords that flow with content.
URLs, titles, descriptions and headers: Your URLs, titles and descriptions have to be well used as search engines use these when figuring out the content of your website. A good SEO copywriter will be able to integrate keywords into them and the content.
Characteristics of a Good SEO Copywriter
Good SEO copywriters are a unique bunch of people and they tend to have the following characteristics:
- Deep understanding of keywords
- Inquisitive
- Able to tell stories
- Adventurous
- Deep digger
- Solves problems
- Able to surprise and delight
- Enjoys research
Smart Solutions’ SEO Content Writing Services
At Smart Solutions, our SEO team is able to balance good content with SEO. We have the right people with the right characteristics that can create great content for your website. Our experienced SEO content writers that can help you with the following:
Contact us now to find out how we can write SEO content for you.
YouTube Video Marketing – Part 2
Google offers ‘AdWords,’ Facebook has ‘Facebook Ads,’ Twitter has ‘Promoted Tweets’ and Linkedin gives us ‘Ads by Linkedin Members.’ While we take advantage of these search and social media sites offering ad programs—why not look to YouTube for ad space as well?
If you’ve ever watched a video on YouTube, you might have noticed the different types of YouTube ads on the site through your experience.
- Arrive at YouTube and you will see the masthead ad.
- Search for a YouTube video and you will see the featured videos along the side.
- Click through to the YouTube video you want and you might get the 15-second ad before the video with promoted videos on the right.
- After your video finally starts, you will get pop-ups throughout your time watching.
Although these advertisements can be intrusive at some times, they are also strategically placed. No matter where you go on the YouTube site, you are sure to find one business or another trying to get brand recognition and clicks.
While you’re deciding what aspect of YouTube advertising would be best for your business, it would be a good idea to keep in mind what we talked about in YouTube Video Marketing Part 1—knowing who you are advertising to. YouTube allows you to choose your target demographic—whether based on age, gender or both. You can also target by keyword, interests or individual channels. YouTube offers such a wide range of targeting techniques that will ensure your success in your YouTube video advertising.
As with Facebook, YouTube offers Insights as well. After you have started your YouTube advertising campaign, you will be able to track the data for every aspect of your promotion and improve on it, so that each subsequent one will be better than the last.
YouTube grows its viewers every day, and is only going to get more popular as time goes on. After all, YouTube is the second most popular search engine, after Google. Don’t hesitate to get started with marketing on YouTube, whether it is through your own channel or YouTube advertising.
For more social media tips and techniques, follow Smart Solutions on Twitter and Facebook!
Social Media Marketing for Business
People are social animals. We like to connect with people in a way that’s conversational and communal. This is the reason for the popularity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter—each of them is highly reliant on the social aspect, being able to communicate with your all of your friends in a single place. But it isn’t just friends in social media—it’s also businesses.
There is only one thing that stops businesses from using social media consistently; it isn’t that people don’t realize the significance of using social networking—it’s that they just don’t have the time.
The Smartz Social Pak – Social Media Packages
Smart Solutions has eliminated that barrier with the all-new SocialPak. This social media package comes in different varieties, depending on what your business requires for social networking.
We cover three different social media sites for our customers—Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. We chose these three because they are each the top in their own field. Facebook is the all-time largest social networking site; Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform; and Foursquare is the top location-based service provider.
Each of the websites offers its own value to a business, and that’s why we offer them both individually and as a group—not every business will need all three.
SocialPak – Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Set-Up
In our LocalPak, there are two different options for you to choose from: The Social Media Monitoring packages or the Social Media Set-Up packages. Again, the choice of which package to use depends on what you’re looking for in your business. We outline some ideas below:
You might want SocialPak Monitoring if…
- You need regular posting on your social media
- You don’t have enough human resources
- You want all your monitoring compiled in one place
- You want weekly reporting
You might want Set-Up SocialPak if…
- You don’t understand how to optimize keywords
- You need a headstart
- You want to stand out right away
- You need to remodel your social media accounts
Give us a call today, if you’re interested in learning more about the Smartz SocialPak. Don’t fall behind in social media marketing. Get Started Now!
Twitter Analytics Tools
For businesses using Twitter, it’s always been a hassle trying to track the impact of your tweets and links. Because Twitter has never offered Twitter business analytics or statistics, we’ve all had to use outside sources—Hootsuite, Tweet Counter and other Twitter analytics tools.
Twitter has Announced Twitter Web Analytics
This has now changed for Twitter users. Last week, the Twitter Developers announced Twitter Web Analytics—an analytics tool that you can access right inside of your Twitter account. No more using outside sources to track your reach, now you can do it straight from the source.
This new update is going to be a great tool for people using Twitter for business, and it’s certainly taken long enough for it to get here!
As you can read on the Twitter Developers blog post, the Twitter business analytics tool won’t be released to the general public for another couple of weeks, after the pilot group has tested it.
There isn’t any word yet whether or not this Twitter statistics update will be for a price, but it’s better than paying an outside source for things you can now get from the inside. This could be a hurt for Hootsuite and other Twitter analytics tools—we’ll have to see how it all pans out.
Let us know if you see the Twitter Web Analytics inside your Twitter account anytime soon, and follow us on Twitter for more updates like this!
SEO Ranking Factors
Google utilizes a series of search engine ranking factors to determine the results that show on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Although Google’s algorithms change all the time, there are some seo ranking factors that remain important.
Mashable came up with the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors to illustrate the most important things that can help you gain traffic from major search engines like Google and Bing. The four major groups of search engine ranking factors are:
- On the Page SEO Ranking Factors
- Off the Page SEO Ranking Factors
- Violations
- Blocking
It is important to note that no one single seo ranking factor promises top rankings. You need to utilize a series of seo ranking factors to gain maximum success. Of course, each seo ranking factor is weighted differently. You will be able to see the different weightage on the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors. For example, quality content (Cq) has a weightage of 3 while age of a website (Th) has a weightage of 1.
On the Page SEO Ranking Factors
The elements On the Page SEO Ranking Factors are those that are in the direct control of the publisher. You can determine the type of content you post on your website, decide on the keywords to use, decide how often you want to post fresh content and pick a good SEO friendly CMS that helps spiders crawl your site better.
Off the Page SEO Ranking Factors
Publishers cannot directly control Off the Page SEO Ranking Factors. These factors are used by search engines to provide an unbiased view as some publishers resort to black hat tactics to rank well on SERP. The Off the Page SEO Ranking Factors allow search engines to sift out quality sites and show them higher on SERP.
Violations
Because publishers resort to black hat tactics, as we’ve talked about earlier, there is a need for search engines to penalize websites in order to provide quality results on the SERP. If search engines feel publishers have violated in many areas, there is a possibility of their websites getting banned.
Blocking
Blocking is done by searchers themselves. They choose to have certain websites blocked from the SERP should they decide they don’t like your website. Publishers can get negative points depending on whether and how many people have blocked the website from search results.
Importance of Understanding Search Engine Ranking Factors
It is important to understand the search engine ranking factors and their weightage. Having more positive factors will increase your change of ranking well on SERP. For example, having fresh content won’t help if the content is not quality content. Having high quality links won’t help if the website is not spider friendly.
Smart Solutions understands the different search engine ranking factors and can help your business rank better on the search engine results page. As an added advantage, we utilize an SEO friendly CMS that can help you score points on the architecture aspect of the On the Page SEO Ranking Factor. Contact our search engine optimization team to hear about our success stories.
YouTube Video Marketing – Part 1
YouTube is a website that allows people to share videos, including user-created video content, movie clips, music videos and more. In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion. YouTube was founded February 14, 2005 and has since come a long way. We have the following impressive statistics:
- YouTube now averages over 2 billion video views per day globally
- 35 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute
- 5% of the time spent on the internet is on YouTube
- Over 13 million hours of footage was uploaded in 2010 alone
How do these figures translate into revenue for business? There are two ways you can use YouTube for business marketing. The first is simple video marketing, which we’ll cover in this blog post. The second is advertising with YouTube, which will be covered in YouTube Video Marketing – Part 2, which will be coming up in a few weeks.
Using YouTube for Business Marketing
One of the hardest statistics about YouTube for business owners to swallow is the second on the statistic list above—35 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute. While the fact that 2 billion videos are watched every day may inspire you to start thinking about YouTube video marketing, the fact that 35 hours worth of video are uploaded every minute is enough to make a person think twice about using the site. That kind of competition is simply overwhelming.
There is one way to get over that figure, and that is to start working. The number of videos uploaded is only going to rise as time goes on, so now is the best time to get started with your YouTube video marketing.
Your YouTube Video Marketing Plan
One of the most important things to have when starting any online marketing is a YouTube video marketing plan. In creating your plan, you will need to keep in mind what you want to get out of this endeavor. Are you looking for increased sales? Brand recognition? Community building? Choose a specific focus and don’t deviate from it.
The second thing to decide on is who you’re advertising to—your target audience. The age, gender or business you are advertising to should determine the style and tone of each of your videos.
With those parameters in place, it’s up to you to start building videos. There are several easy and free tools that can be used for video editing. Start out small and inexpensive, and once you’ve grown your user base, move on to more quality editing programs.
When people start on their YouTube video marketing and can’t get high numbers for their user base, video views and subscriptions, they will often quit before they really had a chance. If there is one thing that we can warn you against, it’s exactly that. The only way to truly gain a following on YouTube is to be consistent.
Bend WebCAM – Web + Creative and Marketing Conference in Bend Oregon
Since its beginning in 2008, the Bend WebCAM has become the go-to conference for the newest Internet marketing techniques. Attracting well-known SEO and web professionals, the two day event draws speakers from all over the United States.
The workshops, lectures and panels that make up the Bend WebCAM are on every online subject imaginable-from social media to SEO, mobile websites to branding, conversion methods to local search. With three different tracks on everything web, you’ll be sure to find the speakers and sessions that are most important to you and your business. The Bend WebCAM 2011 is going to be the one web marketing conference where it all clicks.
Bend WebCAM Agenda Covers SEO, Social Media, Design and More…
The two day internet marketing conference promises two days of mind-blowing concepts related to Web, Creative and Marketing. Here is an excerpt of what the web marketing conference has to offer:
The Ins and Outs of Social Media is a panel discussion featuring a fab four of local experts – moderator Cassondra Schindler; Brenda Speirs, President of Buzztag; John Dempsey, Director of Social Media for American Licorice Company; and Jesse Felder, Owner of Felder & Company and Cat 6 Gaming Lounge. They’ll cover everything from learning how to Tweet to implementing an effective social media plan, including what’s hot in trends and applications, and what’s not in terms of etiquette.
Creative Research + Killer Briefs provides ideas and skills to help you dig for gold in customer, brand and category insights, and shows how to develop a killer brief that gets people excited to bring it to life. Lynette Xanders, CEO and Founder of Wild Alchemy in Portland shares her 20+ years of experience with some of the best agencies and biggest brands in North America to help you create something amazing.
Bring a Friend, Bring a Colleague to Bend WebCAM
Attend the Bend WebCAM internet marketing conference and enjoy even more socializing—hit downtown Bend or visit the Old Mill District for after-conference activities. Visit local restaurants and enjoy the nightlife. Bring a Friend, Bring a Colleague to the internet marketing conference of Bend, Oregon. It all clicks.
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