Archive for May, 2010

You’re Never Done

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Let’s say there are a lot of conversions coming in and everything is balancing out. Everyone is happy, and there’s a lot of things to celebrate about. While it may be time to pop the champagne, no one is done with their work. We have all heard that Internet Marketing, even outside of SEO, is an ongoing process. There’s a lot of things that should be done, and it’s time to consdier what’s going to be the next step. There’s always something that could be done. Getting back to the SEO side, let’s just take a look at the last word of the term: Optimization. There’s really no way to have anything 100% optimized, if that were the case, no one would be getting any SEO contracts.

Sure, we all know that we could always be building more links, and we definitely should. Outside of that, there’s still the on-page that shouldn’t be neglected. A lot of people seem to neglect the on-page SEO after a certain point, as they don’t want to mess with it too much. There’s always changes that can be made to the layout, content, and the general architecture, itself. It should be highly advised that a person does do that, as it can really have a pretty good impact on a website’s conversion rate.

While it’s great to allocate time to other projects, remember that you could always be working on the previous project, especially if it’s making good money.

Linkbuilding with Link Bait

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

There are many guides available on the internet that claim to have the secret for building tons of links overnight, without any negative repercussions from Google. Unfortunately, in most cases this is nothing more than wishful thinking. Over the years Google has refined it’s indexing algorithm to recognize unnatural linkbuilding habits, so most of the quick and easy methods will result in sandboxing, and possibly de-indexing if abused. Fortunately there is a way to build a lot of links in a very short period of time on sites that are genuinely relevant to your niche. The method is known as link baiting, and is perhaps one of the best kept secrets in search engine marketing.

What is Link Baiting?

Link baiting is basically the practice of distributing quality content on article directories and other web 2.0 sites in order to bait other webmasters into posting your content on their site. This is called content syndication, and despite the rumors of duplicate content penalties many sites use syndicated content on a daily basis. Although these webmasters will be using your content on their site it benefits you as well, as they have to leave the author links in tact, otherwise their search engine ranking could be detrimentally affected. In fact, many webmasters use Wordpress plugins that automatically fetch content from web 2.0 sites and RSS feeds, and these plugins leave the author links in tact by default! This means that any link you post in the original article will be posted on these sites, giving you tons of link juice with minimal effort! Backlinks are perhaps the most important part of a website marketing campaign, and link baiting with quality content is by far the best way to bribe other webmasters into giving you backlinks for free.

Explaining SEO to Potential Clients

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

For the person who doesn’t know too much about SEO or Internet Marketing in general, it can be hard for it to be explained to them. This is especially difficult for any marketer to explain to the potential customer when you’re trying to sollicit your service. Unfortunately, if you don’t know how to break it down to them, they certainly won’t feel comfortable enough to take up on the offer. It’s just one of those things, and you can’t blame them, no one buys things that they don’t really understand. And with marketing services not being cheap, it’s imperative that you explain to them how the process works — using things that they understand.

Most people like to explain it by saying that SEO is the way in which search engines find a specific website. This would all be done with all of your on-page work, such as tags and descriptions. And when it comes to off-page SEO, such as link building, they may liken it to a conversation that many people are having about a certain topic. The more people that are talking about it, the more relevant it is to the conversation, giving it credibility. So, to break it down, the search engine needs to discover it. While that may be a muddled mess, a lot of people have had success in explaining it to the person in need of a web presence. There are many ways to explain it, but this is just a starting point.

While this explanation may not convert may people, it definitely gives the potential customer thinking in the right direction.