Hidden perks of custom blog creation

There are plenty of great ways that custom blog creation can help a website to develop, to rank more highly in search engines, and to pull in more traffic and more returning traffic.

Firstly your custom blog is a massive archive of extra content that your customers can be entertained by, or find informative. Whereas on the main pages on your website you’ll be appealing more to general customers, your custom blog is a place you can go into great depth and specificity without cramping up the pages on your website.

Each blog post is also another potential headline waiting to pull in traffic for search results page, another way in to your website so to speak, and another potential interest or topic covered.

A custom blog is also a place you can take comments from your customers / members, and where members can discuss topics between them, this is something that can give a number of potential benefits to an opportunistic website owner.

Firstly it creates a micro community within your customer base, which had to be a good thing. Secondly it’s a potential pool of information for where you could be doing more, or less as a business.

There are also some less obvious ways that custom blog creation gives your website a boost too.

The consistent and frequent nature of posts on a blog, compared to say the regular new page posts in your main website will be far greater. This constant flow of data gives search engines like Google the good impression that your website is an active one, with regular and frequent posts made. This is great for your page ranking on Google and another arm to your SEO strategy.

Plus the backlog of blog posts will never become dormant, should a user search the web for the very precise post made on your blog 5 years earlier, your page could still rank high for relevance and be pulling in traffic into the future.

Custom Blog Creation as a means to pull in traffic

We’ve spoken recently about how companies can use blogs to pull in traffic, and to help the business rank higher on search engines too. But why is blogging so effective, and how exactly does it lead to more traffic for your website?

There are many reasons why blogs have such a powerful magnetism for traffic, though the most general reasons that they work so well are pretty simple to explain. The first way is a well known rule in sales, and basically means the more people you approach to make a sale, the more sales you’ll make. It’s true that you’ll have more rejection too, since the rate of rejection is higher than success, but all you need to care about is those successes slowly racking up. And this is a little bit like how blogging works.

If you run a busy website and over a 3 or 4 year period you write 500 blog posts, you can guarantee that not one of your customers of viewers is going to read every single one of them. In fact most of them will go totally ignored, in fact your customers might not even check your blog. However your blog posts will still come up on Google, and the more you have, the more chances you have that someone searching on your subject will arrive on your page.

If they do, and appreciate your content then you have a new potential customer, if not, you still get a spike in your traffic coming in to your website, and this is good. The more consistent traffic your site pulls in, the higher it will list on search results, thus bringing in more traffic, and so on.

The reason all of this happens over a blog is to separate it from the main, more specific pages of your website. If all of your blog ramblings were on one page then few viewers would stay for long to look around, custom blog creation fulfils your needs and gets the job nicely though.

What makes blog posting unique – as a way to pull in traffic

You’ll no doubt have heard about the fantastic response that many websites get from custom blogging, and the attention that blogs draw from users and consumers alike. Blogging in some cases might not seem relevant to your company, however studies have shown that even the less likely industries can benefit from setting up a blog as a part of your site.

What is blogging?

So first of all, what is blogging? Well blogging describes web posts made which are usually a little shorter than full articles. Blog posts might just be outlining a single thought, or a few comments on a certain topic. But what sets this apart from normal posts on your website?

Well a big part of what makes blogging unique is that it allows much more detail to be made, but which is separate from the main article so that only the particular users who find that post of interest need to read them.

Your main site will have several or more pages of essential information for your customers and users. These pages will receive high volumes of traffic since they will usually remain fixed for weeks, months, or years. Let’s give an example.

If your website is all about how to cut hair, and you have 12 pages which go into real detail about how to cut a particular style. Now there are plenty of offshoots to this topic which many viewers might want to know about, however none apply to all.

For this reason you might direct your viewers to your blog which may feature short articles about what equipment to use, where to find the equipment and so on. It’s true that this info could be put on the main page, but you’ll find that this might mean that your pages go on forever, making them a pain to read for your users who now must rummage through tonnes of info to find the bits relevant to them.

How it helps your website

In addition to giving you a place to store extra info for your customers, there is one other big advantage to blogging for your website.

By having a consistent flow of content to your website you will benefit from higher placement on Google. The more active your website seems, the more it will be prioritised by google, and the more traffic you’ll receive. It will also allow you to reach out to different types of customer, widening your reach.

Custom Blog Creation Provides New Content For Seo Tactics

Google, Bing, And Yahoo Work On The Premise Of Search Engine Optimization, Which Is Nothing New, But You Might Be Surprised At How Many Believe They Can Start Up A Website And Never Touch The Content Again. Part Of SEO Is About Refreshing Your Content For The Search Engine Crawlers, Which Can Be Done Through Custom Blog Creation. In Fact The Search Engines Demand You Have New Content In Order To Keep Your High Rankings. If You Fail To Add In New Information In Some Form Then You Could Find Your Site Slipping And Slipping Until No One Can Find It Other Than With The URL.

There Are Specialists On The Web Willing To Offer Custom Blog Creation. These Individuals Work As Freelance Writers Creating Any Blog Content With Keywords Supplied So That You Have A SEO Yet Reader Friendly Content To Add To Your Site.

Of Course, If You Are Confident In Your Writing Skills Then All You Need To Do Is To Do The Custom Blog Creation Yourself. It Takes An Understanding Of What Keywords Are More Likely To Gain Your Site Attention. You Also Want To Have A Fresh Idea That Truly Gains The Notice Of Your Readers, Not Just A Re-Blog Of The Same Topic 100 Times. With Custom Blog Creation You Need To Create A Blog And Upload It The Same Day Each Week Preferably When You Know Your Clientele Will Be Online Searching The Web For Fun Or Products You Sell.

The SEO Benefits of Custom Blog Creation

Custom blog creation — that is to say, having an SEO company build you a blog specifically for the purpose of SEO and social media — is a huge part of almost every Internet-presence building plan these days. There’s a good reason why; there are things that a carefully-created blog can do that nothing else can.

Easy Keywords For SEO
When you set up your blog, you set it up after your SEO company has done all the keyword research for your main site — and you set it up with your best keywords in several places around blog.

• The categories that you file your posts into should include your keywords.
• The tags you add to each blog post should include your keywords.
• The title of each article should include one keyword
• That means that the permalink URL will also include that same keyword.
• The content of each post should include at least a couple of your keywords, ideally as anchor text for a link back to your landing page.

And that doesn’t even include any SEO plugins, which can add:

• An article summary which should also include the same keyword that appears in the title.
• A keywords box that essentially acts much like the Tags box all over again.
• Potentially other text fields for you to slip more keywords into.

The point of all of this is that because you have so many places to put your keywords in, you don’t have to worry about the keyword density of your posts themselves at all. Just make sure that the keywords you put in the tags, keyword box, et cetera are the same ones that you have once each in your copy, and you’re done.

Easy Linkups for Social Media
There are also a plethora of plugins that can turn every one of your blog postings into a mini social media center. Buttons that let readers easily mention your post on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, or GooglePlus sit pretty right next to links to your company’s own accounts on each of those social media sites. Allow people to link up not just your posts, but other people’s comments on the social sites, and your blog will love the extra backlinks; Google doesn’t care if the backlink leads to a comment or to the main body, it’ll still boost your SERPs.

There are good reasons every SEO plan in the world involves building you a blog — they’re amazing tools for getting seen, and getting seen is everything in the online game.

Get The Crowds talking With Your Custom Blog: Creating Videos That Grab Attention

There’s a lot of things that you can do with a <href=”http://seo911.com/custom-blog-creation.php”>custom blog. Creating infographics, posting provocative political pieces, serializing a story — or you can create some killer videos and really get the attention of your readers.

“But SEO911,” you say, “I don’t have the budget for a killer video!”

You’re thinking wrong: you’re not looking to make a one-time, awesome video. You will still need those, of course — your landing page isn’t really complete without one — but you can outsource those. We’re talking about a vlog. Not a Smoosh or a Jenna Marbles, mind you, but a blog that talks about thing relevant to your industry, your store, your life, and so forth. There’s enough people out there making Harlem Shake/Gangnam Style mashups that you don’t need to try to be all topical and hip.

What you need to do is say things that people are interested in hearing — and that (and this is the most important thing) you care about — and that relate to your business.

Sound hard? It’s surprisingly not. Here’s a few examples.

Toilet Paper
Let’s say you run a service that delivers groceries and other daily necessities to people in the boondocks, or that can’t get out of their home for some other reason. You’ve got a wealth of material there, but let’s just pick one example: rant about Charmin Ultra Strong toilet paper. “I mean seriously, yes, I want strong toilet paper, but do you have any idea how much this stuff has cost people with septic systems? It’s needs a warning on the package: this toilet paper will make your septic system explode violently and without warning.”

Hydraulic Vacuum Pumps
What if you run a company that sells hydraulic parts to industrial complexes that do things like manufacture the rust that we use to “enrich” flour and breakfast cereals. (Yep. Rust.) How do you make hydraulic vacuum pumps interesting? Well, you could go the funny route — rather than BlendTec’s “Will It Blend”, you could have “Will It Suck?” — but in this case it’s too easy to dip into the crude, so let’s talk about something else interesting about your product. “12 places you’d never expect to find a hydraulic vacuum pump: Fishing boats use them to haul their nets in, construction machines use them to operate, etc. etc.”

Video blog posting is great SEO, but it’s vital that you’re able to get your customers attention — if you’re creative, willing to not take yourself seriously, and persistent, it’ll pay off in spades.

Get Your Crowd Talking With Branded Blog Posting and Status Updates

If you’re looking to give your site a real boost, and you’re not sure what you can do to give it the lift it needs, then a branded blog could well be the way to go. Blogs dedicated to your website and business aren’t always the most exciting things when you imagine them in your mind, but there’s no doubt that they can lend a certain vitality to your overall appearance on the World Wide Web. Consider your website, and then consider your social media pages. They should all work together, but where’s the glue that binds it all together? Often it can be through a branded blog.

If you look to an organic SEO company to create a custom blog for you, then you are going to have all the facets necessary for a great presence on the net. You well have a hopefully great looking website, a well tended Facebook site, a Twitter page which is active, and the new addition, a branded blog. The idea is to publish your blog posts to your Facebook page and your Twitter page. Tweet with a link to the blog; write status updates mentioning your latest blog post, with al link back to the blog post.

Naturally you will have some widgets on your branded blog page to your Facebook and Twitter pages. All of this creates a lovely merry go round of your content! It makes your social media pages look active, and your blog post has lots of points of reference. It’s also a great chance to give your business a voice, which should make your brand a little more palatable to some of your clients and consumers.

You can easily find SEO companies to tackle your Custom blog creation. It’s not the most expensive thing to set up, and it’s going to work wonders for your business  as long as you put the time in. If you’re active on your blog, your Facebook and your Twitter pages, you should be on to a winner.

Custom Blog Creation SEO Tip: Link To Your Social Media Profiles In Three Ways

There are lots of variables to think about when you’re doing custom blog creation. Depending on your plugins and your SEO intent, your blog can do everything from semi-automatically pump out keywords at Google like a Texas sharpshooter to lure commenters into generating more relevant keywords for you. But one of the things that every good blog does is link to your company’s social media profiles.

Why? Because you want people who read your blog to sign up for your social media profiles, natch. The more ways that a person interacts with your company online, the more likely they are to become the kind of ‘fan’ that generates backlinks for you — or at least triggers some decent social signals for some of your content. To that end, we encourage every blogger to link up to their company’s social media profiles three ways:

One: Social Bookmarking Buttons
There are a few ways that social bookmarking buttons can be used, depending on the plugin or widget you’re using to display them. The basic social buttons (Pin, Like, Tweet, Share, +1) will put your blog link up on the social profile of the clicker — but you can also set those buttons up so that clicking them links your social media profile instead, and that’s gold.

Two: Sidebar Links
Every custom blog should have buttons or text links in the sidebar that say things like “Follow my Twitter Account”, “Join Us On Facebook”, and all of the other kinds of tripe that you’ve seen before. It might be banal, but it’s there because it works — those links actually are clicked by people who are interested, and that’s what you want.

Three: In Post
Not every post needs to have a call-to-action that begs your audience to come over to your social media profiles and sign up — that gets kind of weak. (Looking at you, SEOmoz.) But when you do, and you should occasionally, you should always make sure that your beg comes in the form of a link to your social media profiles. That way those people who are inclined to follow can do so without interrupting their thought by having to think.

Link up your blog to your profiles like this, and you’ll go a long way toward maximizing your blog’s impact on the social sphere — which is golden.

Every Custom Blog Creates It’s Own Following With Social Media Buttons

These days, there’s no such thing as a blog that isn’t a marketing tool. Even if you’re just a single dad blogging about your daily life, every blog is a money-making venture. If you’re not profiting from your blog, guaranteed whoever is hosting it is. And there’s nothing wrong with that — but it does mean that blogs are, quite justifiably, ranked by observers largely based on the size of the crowds they draw.

Fortunately, it’s not hard to get a decent following going. Be edgy and vaguely inflammatory, post regularly and with a consistent topic and voice, and by all means encourage your crowd to grow itself. That means lavishing social media buttons all over your custom blog. Creating a following is often as easy as showing people how easy it is to tell their friends about things they love.

Whether you start with the basics, like Facebook and Google Plus; you go old-school with the Digg and Reddit-style social bookmarking buttons; or you get into the mass-sharing arena with Tweet and Pinterest buttons, putting some kind of social media buttons — if not all of them — on your blog is a great way to grow your readership. After all, people love to share the things they enjoy with their friends and family. Rather than make them email URLs back and forth to one another, give them a simple button that they can push that will tell everyone about the coolness automatically.

Nothing can guarantee that you’ll go viral, but shouldn’t you give your followers every chance to make it happen? Especially if you mention the buttons (subtly of course), or just make them very obvious and flashy, your articles will naturally find their way out into the world.

Just as importantly, you’ll be able to judge your posts’ success based on the number of people who click on the buttons. By paying attention over a few months, you’ll be able to get an idea of what your followers actually care about — or are at least entertained by. Replicate those, keep your base growing, and you’ll be a hit.

Custom Blog Creation: One Step In The Never Ending Story of Organic SEO

Custom blog creation is a staple of modern SEO, and for darn good reason — a blog has all kinds of good SEO going on.

Keywords
A properly set up blog can help you automatically target a few choice keywords even if you’re not SEO savvy enough to work them into your posts. By choosing categories, tags, and even usernames that are the very keywords you want to target, you make sure that those keywords show up a few times per page. If you are SEO savvy enough to toss them into your titles and opening paragraphs, you can redouble the effects — but even if you’re a complete SEO ignorant, a custom-built blog can go a long way toward getting your rankings up just because of it’s background mechanics.

Relevance
One thing that every backlink needs in order to boost your rankings is relevance. Because you create the content yourself, blogs are pretty much always relevant to the pages you link them to. You are blogging about business on your business blog and personal stuff on your personal blog, right? Then you’re pretty much good on the relevance front.

Link Structure
You’ve probably got more than one page that surfers could land on. Maybe you have a home page, an About Us page, and a Testimonials page. With your blog, you can link to each of those pages, and link to the more important pages more often. That’ll help Google decide which pages to direct traffic to. Furthermore, if you’re clever, you can help Google decide which pages on your site are relevant to which keywords by consistently linking, for example, “Custom Blog Creation” to the same page on your site — say, the one where you offer to custom-make blogs for your clients.

Freshness
Freshness — in other words, unique content that’s been created recently — is one of the things that Google loves more than anything else. It’s one of the core tenants of organic SEO: fresher content is better than stale. Blogs by their very nature insist that you produce fresh content by doing your blog posting on a regular basis, so you get freshness automatically alongside your keywords, relevance, and link structures.

Yep, blogs are pretty much going to be a part of the SEO game forever — better get back to posting yours!

SEO Never Stops: The Art of Long Term Blog Posting

When you start SEO, you should do it fully aware that you are necessarily in for the long haul. There’s no such thing as “a little bit of successful SEO”. You can have SEO in little bits, or you can have successful SEO, but not both, because SEO requires constant upkeep in order to keep your website on the top of the SERPs.

Enter your blog. If you’ve had your SEO company to a proper job of custom blog creation, your blog will have all manner of backlink-generating considerations built into it, and every post you make will be worth quite a bit when you pop that link back to your landing page. But if you let your habit of regular blog posting fall off, all of that SEO effort and expense is essentially wasted.

So how do you keep finding stuff to post about after the first 52 weekly posts? It’s a matter of switching things up while staying relevant.

• Try talking to another business owner in the same field and see what he thinks about the future of the market. Blog about his commentary.
• Focus on a specific and narrow part of your business process, whether it’s how you select your vendors or the importance of regularly organizing your widgets.
• Talk about a specific incident that occurred as a part of your normal business process. Redact the names, of course, but share your experience.
• If you’re really stuck, go back and find another post of yours that has gotten a lot of commentary and do an ‘update’ or a readdress of the same topic.
• You can even delve a little bit into your personal life as long as you can relate it back to your business.

The art of learning how to blog in the long term is of vital importance to any small business owner that doesn’t want to pay his SEO company to blog for him for the next several years. Get used to the idea now, and keep it up – anything less is a waste.

Why You Should Link Your Blog Posting to Facebook, Twitter, and More

Social networking — a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that it’s something primarily engaged in by seventeen year old girls on iPads. Just recently, however, a startling study revealed that the primary ‘customer’ of the social networking phenomenon is a mid-30s white middle-class white-collar worker. So what does that mean for your business?

Simple — it means that if you intend to appeal at all to the largest demographic in America, you should be involved in social networking. Fortunately, it’s easy — almost every single blogging engine out there offers social networking widgets that make it a snap to set up buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and lately Google Plus. You should use them. Every website, every blog posting, every piece of content you have your article writing and distribution team create should have social networking buttons featured prominently and above the fold.

In a lot of cases, it’s even automatic — if you post an article to EZineArticles.com, for example, your social buttons are front and center. If you need to have your blog hand-built by an expert in custom blog creation to make the social media buttons made equally clear and ubiquitous, do it. The reason why is simple: people love to share their opinion on stuff.

As long as your stuff really is good, their opinions should generally be positive — and that means your social media pages become like giant referrals. Other people searching for your business will see that you have twelve thousands Likes or what have you, and they’ll understand that that means you have a quality product.

All of this is particularly relevant to blog postings, because your business blog is the one place that your words and your brand are eternally and explicitly linked. Every blog post you make acts as a potential landing page for people who are being exposed to your brand for the first time, and if they like what they see, they’re likely to click that Like button before they do much else.

That’s a powerful step toward building a social following, which is on it’s way to becoming one of the most vital parts of modern marketing.

Ultimate Conversions: Targeted Email Marketing From The Outside In

Targeted Email Marketing (TEM) is NOT typically part of the services offered by a website SEO company. That’s because it’s not actually SEO — there is nothing about TEM that will get your website ranked any higher for anything anywhere.

What TEM is, however, is a way of improving the effectiveness of any SEO you’ve already done. That’s because of a simple calculation:

Traffic * Conversion Rate = Sales

What that means is that if you have 200 visitors, and you convert 3% of them, you’ve just made 6 sales. You can improve your number of sales by getting more traffic, or you can do it by improving your conversion rate. SEO is designed to get you more traffic — but at some point, you’ll make more money by improving your conversion rate than you will by adding another 4 or 5 visitors per day.

So, Targeted Email Marketing. Have you ever seen a website that offers you something for free, but asks you to put in your name and Email address in order to get it? That’s TEM in action. If you’ve ever done this, you know that the next step is to receive an Email that says “hey, is it cool that you continue to receive Email from this website?”, and you have to say “yes” in order to get the free thing.

What you’ve just done is confirm via Email that any further Emails the webmaster of that site sends you aren’t spam and you accept his right to send them to you. From his perspective, he now has a ‘hook’ in you. He can send you an Email whenever he has a new sale, a new product, or even just because he wants to impress you with how knowledgeable and competent he is in his field.

As you can imagine, it’s a killer way to turn visitors into buyers, because you can remind them of your product and your offer every week…forever! You can keep trying different angles until you find one that sticks. Every time you throw an Email out to your TEM list, you get a bunch of them back on your website for another chance at that 3% conversion rate.

That’s the kind of tool that SEO companies typically overlook because they’re focused on traffic, but if you find an SEO company that offers TEM as a service, you know you’ve got someone who is focused on improving your profits from every possible angle — a great find.

Social Bookmarking Is a Sucker’s Game — Isn’t It?

There’s been a lot of changes to the social bookmarking game in the past few years. Even as far back as Google’s addition of the nofollow tag, social bookmarking pages have been declared ‘dead’ over and over again by various SEO gurus. Yet somehow, it keeps coming back like a zombie in a B-grade horror movie. The fact is that social bookmarking might not be the utterly amazing backlink that it was when Digg and del.ici.ous first invented the term, but they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

The reasons why are several, but the big ones are very big.

Control
A social bookmark gives you control over two things that are very important: the context around your link (what many organic SEO experts like to call “Latent Semantic Indexing” or “LSI”), and the actual anchor text of the link itself. Every time you get a link to your site, Google looks at the anchor text and the LSI to determine how relevant the linking page is to your website, and modified the link’s strength based on the relevance. That makes controllable links much stronger than uncontrollable ones.

Persistence
There’s nothing like investing a few thousand dollars in a massive and complex link building campaign and then discovering six months later than half of the sites you linked from have either disappeared or at least eliminated your links. That’s a lot of money and time down the drain. Mercifully, social bookmarking sites don’t do that. They are persistent, which means every well-controlled link you build on a social bookmarking site is here to stay.

Panda
Yes, I said Panda. Panda is the latest Google toy, and it’s designed to make sites more ‘user-friendly’. One of the things that the Goog decided when they built Panda was that social bookmarking buttons are totally cool to have featured prominently on a website (as opposed to, say, AdWords blocks or banner ads.) That means that, as the Web adapts to the latest twist Google has for us, social bookmarking is only going to get more and more used, which means social bookmarks will get more authority. What more do you need to know?

Who Else Should Be Looking Into Custom Blog Creation?

Custom blog creation is the name of a service that SEO companies have been selling to small businesses for years. It’s a very dependable way to improve a website’s rankings for particular keywords, which is exactly why it’s used — but it’s also relatively easy and inexpensive, which is why it’s marketed as a regular component of small business SEO.

A customized blog allows you to have content pages (which attract surfers) that then link back to your main site with controllable context and controllable anchor text. That, in turn, makes the site more likely to rank for the keywords that you use as anchor text. Thus, blogs serve as both an SEO tool and as part of your sales funnel — exactly the kind of multipurpose power that small businesses need in their tools. But there are other entities who should be looking into custom blog creation as well.

Individuals
If you’re a freelancer looking to make a name for yourself, one of the biggest steps you can take on the road to stable success is to build yourself a website. People who want to learn about you — to decide whether to hire you — are going to Google you; that’s just a fact of life. You can let them find your Facebook page with your drunken college pictures, or you can present them a professional face.

Having a blog attached to that professional face is a great way to show your potential employers that you know your game. Write about what you do, about your challenges and your victories, and about the details of whatever skill you apply on a regular basis. As before, not only do you get to show off, but you can optimize your website for killer keywords at the same time.

Public Entities
It’s one thing to be in business, but the public sector is another area entirely. One thing that both groups seem to consistently need, however, is more attention. If you happen to be a hospital director, a college principal, or the head of any other public institution, you might not be aware of just how easy it is to focus the right eyes on your Web presence: all you need is a blog. Everything said above applies just as well to an .edu or an .org than it does to a .com — don’t hesitate!

When and Why To Put All You’ve Got into Article Writing and Submission

There is ample evidence for anyone out there looking that article writing and submission is a killer SEO tactic. The reasons are pretty simple: content is king, control is key, and article directories are heavyweights.

Content is King
Google loves content. If you write an article that talks intelligently about facts that aren’t already discussed to death elsewhere on the Internet, Google will love you. You’ll rank well for quite a few keywords, and people will see your words. Put a decent call to action at the bottom with a link to your site, and you’re likely to get quite a few clickthroughs.

Control is Key
When you create a backlink to your site, Google uses it to decide what your site is about. Having a backlink to a site about golf from a site about pit bulls confuses Google. When you write an article, you control the context of your backlink perfectly, giving Google a strong signal about what your site is about. Strong signals mean better ranking.

Article Directories are Heavyweights
Article directories are classic examples of what Google called “authority sites” — their pages are considered pretty trustworthy. What that means is that every link you get from a respected article directory gives your site a lot of ‘juice’.

So the question is When and Why to put your effort into writing articles (as opposed to building backlinks by doing some other form of website SEO)? The answer isn’t what you might think. The thing about article writing and distribution is that it takes a lot of time and effort per article. Articles should be high on your priority list if and when your ‘SEO basics’ are already taken care of. Before you get heavy into articles, make sure you’ve got a natural link profile consisting of:

• • Social bookmarks
  • Forum posts
  • Blog posts
  • Blog comments
  • Web 2.0 properties
  • Directory entries
  • RSS aggregations
  • Link exchanges
  • and Videos

Once your backlink structure has the low-effort, high-rankings-impact backlinks above built, then and only then should you invest significant money into getting articles written and submitted Getting there might take a month or three, but the effect of good articles backed up by a solid link profile is pure gold.

First Page Placement Doesn’t Mean Automatic Success

There’s a lot of emphasis put on first page placement by SEO companies. Like many industries, they have a strong motivation to sell you on the idea that they can solve all of your problems. In the Web Wide World, “all your problems” seem to spring from a single source: not enough traffic.

So long as X% of visitors convert into sales, then more traffic equals more money. It seems pretty simple. If only it really were. But it’s easily possible — in the case of someone unfamiliar with the basics of marketing, even downright probable — that you can get a site listed on the first page of a decent keyword and get nothing for it.

There are a few ways that can happen. The first is if you go the ‘sponsored placement’ route. That is, pay-per-click (or PPC) marketing. With PPC, every time a surfer clicks on your advertisement, you pay a few cents. They end up on your page. But if they don’t buy anything from your page, you lose those few cents. Over hundreds of clicks per day, that can add up pretty fast.

That’s why, if you’re going to go the PPC route, it makes sense to hire a PPC management team that knows their stuff. They can keep costs down and traffic high at the same time — something that’s virtually impossible for a webmaster working alone.

Another way that you can waste a valuable first page placement is by having a page that simply doesn’t convert well. If you manage to do enough organic SEO to get real regular search traffic to your site on a regular basis (virtually the only functional alternative to PPC), you still need them to buy stuff.

There are a lot of ways to encourage them to convert. Learning sales language and call-to-action prompts are good. Belcher buttons (look up) are virtually mandatory. Using a gimmick like a web presenter or a focus video can work well in the right fields. Regardless of how you do it, you have to pay attention to conversions as well as traffic. Only then will your first page placement really mean what the marketers want you to believe it will.

Go Local! Internet Marketing for Brick and Mortar Businesses

Local internet marketing isn’t a new phenomenon if you’re familiar with online marketing in general — but if you’re a brick and mortar business just starting to build your online presence, you might be curious what the hoopla is about. There’s a lot of people out there talking in a lot of very excited voices about online marketing; this is the straight scoop.

“Reach audiences worldwide! Have an online storefront open 24/7/265!”
You’ll hear this one a lot. The truth couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, a website could potentially get hits from Pak Gwak Kai or Orniok, but the fact is that Google knows where you live. Google isn’t going to show your trading-card store to someone searching for rookie Chesbro if that person is searching from Latvia. They’re going to show that guy a store in Latvia. Google isn’t dumb.

On the other hand, if you deliberately include your location in all of your marketing strategies — what we call local internet marketing — you’ll end up showing up high on the results pages whenever anyone searches for “trading cards in Los Angeles”. SEO gets a lot easier when you keep it local.

“All you need to make money is a website and some traffic! It just runs itself!”
Yeah. That’s kind of like saying all you need to run the United States is an Oval Office and the title of President. It’s easy to say, but actually getting those things isn’t terribly easy. I mean, putting up a website is pretty easy, but then you also have to have a website that people will buy stuff from. That’s harder.

Also, getting traffic to come to that site isn’t all that easy, either. The best way to go about it is to get your site ranked on various relevant Google searches, but that means paying for someone to optimize your site for those keywords. Because local keywords are much lower competition than broad keywords, they’re much quicker and much cheaper to rank for — making local internet marketing a much smarter option.

What It Mean to Be Affordable? SEO and Cashflow Economics

Let’s just get one thing clear: the economy ain’t recovering. It’s not a matter of time, it doesn’t matter who’s in office — the economy isn’t going to recover for decades. That means that every single entrepreneur who tries to get started online is looking for the same thing: affordable SEO.

But what is affordable SEO? Affordable means a lot of things to a lot of different people. If you’ve got a J.O.B., affordable means it’s within your monthly budget. If you’re rich, affordable means it’s purchasable. If you’re an entrepreneur, however, affordable means it fits within your cashflow.

That’s because an entrepreneur has to deal with invoices — both incoming and outgoing –that are much less reliable than a paycheck. Sometimes, all of an entrepreneur’s money comes in at once; sometimes, it trickles in bit by bit every day. The question for an entrepreneur isn’t whether something is affordable overall; it’s whether the payment can be spread over a long enough time that there’s never a cashflow issue generated when the payment comes due.

In that way, most forms of organic SEO are still affordable to most entrepreneurs. Sure, there are always SEO companies who want you to pay three large on the first of every month to get their ultra-platinum superservice, but they’re dying if not dead. Real SEO companies have options.

Of course, you still need to have a bit of an idea what your cashflow needs will be — but the beauty of SEO is that it’s cumulative. From a cashflow perspective, that means you can get a little bit done when you have a little money, or if you catch a lucky break, you can buy a better service for a month or two. SEO isn’t a startup cost, that must be paid all at once — it’s not even like a bill that has to be paid every month.

What SEO is is a marketing expense — and any business guru will tell you what when money is tight, the best place to put your money is in advertising. How else are you supposed to start bringing money in? Especially online, SEO is the key to traffic which is the key to sales.

In the end, then, SEO is affordable when it doesn’t ruin your cashflow, and that’s the only consideration, because every ‘unit’ of SEO you purchase promises future income. The ‘right’ move, then, is to buy what you can afford when you can afford it, consistently.

Google’s Games: Is Organic SEO Still Viable?

I just heard the worst words an SEO guy could ever hope to hear: a client told me on the phone that “organic SEO just isn’t working anymore.” He was talking, as you might have guessed from the title, about Panda.

If you’ve never heard of Panda, here’s the story. A Google software engineer named SomethingLongAndIndian Panda came up with a learning algorithm that keys off of the “user-friendliness” of a webpage. The Goog did a bunch of research into what pisses users off about websites, and turned it into a bunch of “do-nots”, taught the Panda algorithm about them, and then let Panda inform the Google main algorithm about website rankings.

The end result? If your webpage isn’t easy to use — and that means easy on the eyes, not just easy to find the “buy now” button — it won’t rank well, period. There are a few things that Panda takes a look at that aren’t on the traditional list of website SEO rules:

Readability
In other words, is your content interrupted by crap? Adwords, banners, even poorly-located navigation bars are considered ‘no-go’ by Panda. If you want an example of a website that reoptimized to Panda’s standards, go look at any article on EZineArticles.com. There’s an author pic, an unobtrusive info panel with social buttons, and that’s it until after all of the content. All of the crap that the reader might consider unimportant comes at the bottom.

Fat Content
It used to be that a 200 word article was adequate for SEO purposes — not anymore. Panda hates thin content. You’d better have at least 400-600 words on a webpage if you expect Panda to consider it quality enough to get a decent ranking, straight up.

Broad Quality
Panda also knows your sister. Or rather, your webpage’s sister. While Panda gives a quality score to every page, it also gives a quality score to an entire site, and the two modify each other. So if you have one Panda-perfect page on an otherwise horrible site, you can’t expect it to rank. Quality has to be across all pages.

In the end, I told that client of mine that he had no idea what he was talking about. The truth of the matter is this: Panda isn’t a whole new set of rules — all of the old rules are still there, and they still work. We just have a few more points to take into consideration, that’s all.