Search Marketing

This post has been modified from one of our regular Thursday emails. Enough people told me to post it online so I did… with a few additional thoughts that are worth considering. If you missed it, it’s all about how to know whether your SEO company is doing a good job – what to look out for, how to judge and what you should know to make an educated decision about your business. After all, nobody cares about your business as much as you do. If you don’t protect it, who will? Find out what some of the warning signs are that your company could be scamming you (or at least incompetent) and how to find the gems in the coalmine.

It’s Monday… if you’re one of our American friends, you’re probably recovering from a long weekend and maybe not too eager to be back at the grindstone. The last thing you want is a long, detailed, brain-busting blog post with a hundred things to do and two hundred to remember. Fear not! For today’s 5-Minute-SEO, I’ve got some simple, easy and effective ways to find the best keywords for your web page or next blog post. All you need is the knowledge that you already have about your business – stuff I bet you know in your sleep – and a few minutes to brainstorm. You may even find this exercise a bit of fun! If you have any questions when you get to the end, shoot them my way.

First there was Panda, then there was Penguin, then there was Panda/Penguin 2.0. Now Google has come out and officially said that unless your site is mobile friendly, your mobile ranking will suffer. If you feel like you can barely get a handle on this SEO stuff, let alone all the changes, here are 10 basic, fundamental things to do to optimize your site without going overboard or needing to worry about the next Google update.

Does SEO give you a bit of a headache? Do the “rules” about where to use keywords, how to build links and Google’s endless release of animal-themed updates have you wishing the internet had never been born? You’re not alone. Even as someone who provides SEO services, I’m constantly frustrated by the stream of do-this-not-that advice coming from Google headquarters. But what is SEO these days, really? And why do we need it? These are my thoughts… well, to be fair its more of a rant… on what SEO is, isn’t and what it means to us as businesses and marketers.

Google has made it pretty clear: inbound links matter. They append that with “quality, relevant…” and that sounds like a sensible thing until you realize that the definition of a “quality, relevant” link has changed over the years. Unfortunately, many of us are still following old ways and now we’re getting knocked down in the rankings because of it. Every new update seems to tighten the noose, so what should we do? Here are a few tips that can help you build links that count and avoid those that appear to spam. Google may change its mind again, but for now these are simple, practical ideas that can not only get you links, but help build your overall traffic and credibility too. And that can never be bad!

Photos are getting bigger, bolder and they’re showing up in more and more places, from social networks to search engines. Besides being fun to look at, images and photos can help drive traffic to your website. There’s a strong case to be made for making sure you use attractive and interesting photos, but even if you have the greatest photos in town, it won’t do you a lot of good if people can’t find them. Here are a few ways you can optimize your images so they’ll show up in search engines and help drive traffic back to your website.

Some SEO mistakes are costlier than others. Choosing the wrong keywords, though it may not end in a disaster like getting banned from Google, will have the same effect as choosing no keywords and doing no optimization at all. And that’s just a waste of your time and a loss for your business. Here are a few ways you could be derailing your efforts before you even begin. And how to rethink your efforts for a better result.

Whether you’re a restaurateur, doctor, lawyer, retailer, or marketer, if you have a local brick-and-mortar business and want to attract customers to your location, optimizing your online presence for local SEO can be an important step in increasing your exposure. But what is local SEO? If you’re interested in driving traffic to your store or location then let’s review what that is and how to optimize for it.

Cute, fuzzy names like “panda” and “penguin” aside, is it just me or does Google seem to be waging a personal vendetta against all things SEO? Now, I’m not going to say anything eye-rolling like “SEO is dead” but it does seem as if the search engine-turned-verb has been perpetrating some evil on the idea of optimization. Here’s why I think we’re witnessing the assassination of SEO and what we can do to deal with it as it happens.

Most businesses are familiar with SEO, if only from the standpoint that they know it’s something they need to do and they probably lose sleep over how to do it right. But few make a distinction between the “O” (Optimization) and the “M” (Marketing). They’re related – but different. And how you approach them can make the difference between a successful website and one that floats among the flotsam of the internet hoping to bump up against a customer. Find out what the distinction is, but more importantly, find out how to tie them together into a successful marketing strategy.