Marketing

SEO Basics for the Online Business DIYer

Five minutes of exposure to any form of today’s media—TV, magazines, the blitzkrieg of emails from trendy companies you don’t remember giving your email address to—will tell you that we’re living in the Do-It-Yourself era. Grow a vegetable garden on your windowsill! Get that kitchen you always dreamed of! Cook Thai cuisine at home! The ever-growing lineup of home renovation shows and YouTube videos on How to Trick People into Thinking You’re Good Looking are now being joined by another category of DIYers: the online entrepreneurs. Where we used to see ads for designer business cards, now it’s all about website design (GoDaddy.com, WhoIs.com, and Wix.com, to name a few). More and more self-starters are taking their businesses online without the help of web designers. So how do you know if you’re doing it right?

Successfully marketing your business online is more than simply having a pretty website (though we certainly appreciate the pretty ones too). The DIY website operator needs one very important tool in his or her skills toolbox: search engine optimization (SEO). Without it, your site will be about as visible as a sandwich board on the side of a dirt road in back-country New Mexico.

So what is SEO, anyway?

SEO is what makes your website show up in Internet searches; knowing some SEO basics can mean the difference between being on page 1 or page 237 of Google search results. You want to make sure your website will be found easily by potential customers.

Can I really do SEO on my own?

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! Okay, so maybe you don’t need to be as dramatic as a Jane Austen heroine, but celebration is definitely in order. SEO doesn’t require coding or even knowledge of HTML; it’s about word choice and placement. What’s that? Could it really be that simple? The following SEO tips for beginners should get you started.

1. Use your words

Choose your keywords carefully (these being the words potential visitors are likely to enter into a search engine), and direct their placement even more so. Your primary keyword should be in the page’s URL, your content’s title, the page description, and ideally in the first 50 words of your body text. Keywords should appear throughout your content but not so often as to make the writing feel clumsy or spammy.

2. Tag, you’re it!

Don’t neglect your alt tags and image tags! With every image and link on your page, you have an opportunity to pump up your keyword usage. These tags (the text that appears when you hover your mouse over an image or link) should always be filled in with a concise label or description that contains your primary keyword.

3. A picture is worth a thousand clicks

A trick to jumping ahead in search engine rankings is to use different forms of media. Not only will eye-catching images and interesting videos appeal to visitors to your website, but they’ll also show up in image or video searches and even in regular web results. As Google displays the most relevant videos and images at the top of its results pages, you can sneak into visibility ahead of even the best-optimized text-only websites.

4. Content is king, but you don’t have to be a prince from Bel Air to be fresh!

We can’t stress enough the importance of fresh, relevant content. Visitors to your website won’t stick around (or come back) if what they find was last updated in 2002. That being said, constantly posting updates just for the sake of updating while falling behind on real need or quality won’t help you. Be mindful of what you’re saying when you post. Are you addressing the current needs and inquiries of your customers? Are you staying up to date and on top of trends? Determine a reasonable strategy, whether it means daily social media posts, posting blogs or articles two to three times a week, or seasonal promotions.

5. Feel the need—the need for speed!

Nobody likes a sluggish website. When the next option is only a click away, the chances of a potential customer actually waiting for a stalling website to load are slim to none. Cut down on bandwidth-hogging applications like Flash or JavaScript, and compress your files and images. Page speed is factored into search engine rankings.

6. Stay mobile

The popular build-a-site websites we mentioned earlier each come with arsenals of free templates for the not-so-technically-inclined. Make sure to choose one that is also designed to suit mobile devices. Not only are visitors unlikely to stay on your page if it isn’t readable on their phones and tablets, but Google is now factoring mobile optimization into its ranking system.

7. ‘Cause it’s all about those links, ’bout those links, no bouncing!

Basic but beautiful is the concept of linking back to your own website. Every time you post new content, include a link back to your site, be it to your homepage, landing page, or archive. If you’re using social media to market your business (and you really should be), include links to your website in your posts. Finally, establish relationships with relevant websites so that you can provide links to each other’s sites. Each link means more potential traffic and a greater chance of appearing in search engine results; just make sure that links to your site are appearing on legitimate, relevant pages.

How do I know if it’s working?

What is success if you can’t see it? Take a moment now to sign up for Google Analytics. This comprehensive system of tools lets you track who your customers are, what it is they need, what they’re looking at on your website, and how they’re reacting to it. You can also monitor what paths bring visitors to your website and from what kinds of devices so that you can continue tweaking your site to further drive traffic and conversions. From there, the power is all yours!

9 SEO Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

Ah, search engine optimization (SEO). There’s nothing quite like trying desperately to make an algorithm favor you to make you miss the good old days of traditional marketing and advertising. You already spend half your life trying to get people to approve of you, and now you have to do the same thing with an abstract online entity? This is not why you went into business.

But the truth is, it doesn’t matter how much you resent SEO best practices. Whether you like it or not, good SEO practices are key to improving your website’s visibility, thereby increasing your traffic and (hopefully) your conversion rates. Try not to think of SEO as just one annoying thing you have to do to maintain your website; instead, think of how it can directly improve your return on investment (ROI). So how can you use SEO best practices to improve your business?

The first thing you can do is avoid making mistakes. SEO newbies—and people who have been in the game for a while but have neglected to keep up with the times—tend to make the same kinds of mistakes when it comes to optimizing their websites. If you can avoid these SEO mistakes, you’ll be well on your way to a well-optimized site:

1. Keyword stuffing

If you’ve ever written copy for a website, you’ve heard about the importance of using keywords for SEO. Using the right keywords can bring the right audience to your website, and optimizing the use of these keywords properly can help get the attention of search engines. But do you know what won’t help you? Keyword stuffing.

Cramming a keyword as many times as possible into your copy makes one thing very obvious to both readers and search engines: your content is worthless. You don’t have anything valuable to say, so instead you’re using keywords to get people to your site in hopes that getting them there will be enough to get them to convert. But search engines aren’t going to fall for this trick anymore—instead of getting results with keyword stuffing, you’ll find yourself with a keyword-crammed website with very few visitors and a bad ranking on Google.

2. Buying links

The statement “backlinks are important for SEO” isn’t false—it’s just incomplete. The whole truth is that “quality backlinks are important for SEO.” Don’t go around purchasing shoddy links from sketchy sites in hopes that they will increase your traffic and your PageRank. Google will know and, strict disciplinarian that Google is, your site will suffer for a long time for making this rookie SEO mistake.

3. Not updating your site

You’ve spent months creating a beautiful, user-friendly website. You’ve written five helpful blog posts, and you’ve optimized your site using well-researched keywords. Now you sit back and watch the traffic flow, waiting for those visitors to convert to leads and those leads to convert to customers. You’ve been working hard for months; now it’s time for that work to pay off. Right?

Wrong. SEO is a constant effort, and it involves keeping your site active. So you’ve published five great blog posts? That’s awesome, but now you need to make a schedule for posting new posts on a regular basis, and you need to stick to it. If you aren’t constantly updating your content, search engines aren’t going to notice you.

4. Using keywords as an afterthought

There is one way and only one way to use keywords. First, you have to do your keyword research. Then, you have to use that research to determine what you need to write about. That way, you can organically incorporate the right keywords into your copy.

This means that you can’t decide to write something, do keyword research, and try to figure out how to add those keywords into something you’ve already written. Keyword usage needs to be natural. One of the keywords for this blog post, for example, is “SEO mistakes.” You’ll notice that this post is about SEO mistakes, which makes that keyword significantly easier to use than if this post had been about writing blogs. Figure out what people are searching for, and provide them with relevant and helpful information about that topic. You’ll find that keyword integration is something you’ll barely even have to think about.

5. Neglecting social media

Social media is no longer optional. If people cannot find you on popular sites like Facebook and Twitter, they’re going to seriously question your company’s credibility. You know what else social media is great for? Sharing the material you’ve worked so hard to optimize on your website. Sharing your content means search engines have more places to find it, which means that potential visitors can find you in different places. Building a loyal social media following is also great for brand awareness.

6. Lack of internal links

It may seem somewhat counterintuitive to link to your own content. You may even think that search engines will find this behavior suspicious; after all, shouldn’t your goal be to have other sites link to you for verification of your credibility? Despite what you may think, linking to different pages on your own website is actually a good SEO practice. It helps search engines crawl your website, and it lends greater authority to your site. You should focus on the most important pages of your site and figure out how you can link those pages to things like blog posts. Remember, don’t just do this randomly; only link internally if there is a real connection between the two pages.

7. Not measuring your progress

What’s the first thing you do when you decide to lose weight? In fact, what causes you to want to lose weight? Obviously, you need to start by weighing yourself. Then, you create a strategy for shedding those pounds, and you continue to weigh yourself on a regular basis to ensure that strategy is giving you the results you want. If it isn’t, and you aren’t losing weight, you change the strategy.

Improving your SEO is just like losing weight. You need to know where you are when you start, and you need to keep track of your progress as you go. If you don’t have solid metrics to show your progress (or lack thereof), how will you ever know that your SEO practices have been working? Sure, you may notice vague improvements, but if you can’t identify exactly what these improvements are and what caused them, you’re wasting your time.

8. Not fixing broken links

Search engines crawl websites to figure out how well those sites should rank. You know what search engines don’t like? Being interrupted. And you know what website users don’t like? Clicking on a link that takes them to a big, fat, irritating “404” page.

Do yourself and your website a favor: make sure there are no broken links on your site. This is all part of keeping your website active and current. Having a few broken links on your site is not going to completely destroy your site’s rank, but it is a small factor to consider when you’re optimizing.

9. Prioritizing links over content

This list of SEO mistakes has made it pretty clear that it’s better to have no links than it is to have bad links. Buying links or submitting your site to sketchy directories is a great way to bomb your website’s ranking. Why? Because search engines know that, instead of creating quality content for your visitors, you’re trying to trick search engines into promoting your page. Content should be your number one priority when it comes to improving your SEO and building a better site. Links should be the consequence of that content. In case I haven’t made this clear, let me put it simply: content first, links later.

4 Online Marketing Tools to Enhance Your Brand

Boost your online presence and find more clients

If you run a business, then you already understand the importance of marketing.

Nowadays, marketing is more than cold calling or direct mail campaigns. To really make an impression, you need to establish a solid online presence and a high level of engagement with your audience. This involves leveraging social media, blogging, email campaigns, and more.

That’s a lot to do for any business. These four online marketing tools will help simplify your efforts and make you feel more confident about your relationships with clients.

1) Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft combines the best of online marketing into one easy-to-use tool. With Infusionsoft, you’ll receive different resources for selling, content marketing, and building an email list.

Infusionsoft brings you closer to your contacts than ever before by allowing you to track their payment histories, lead scores, and email clicks. This information will help you tailor marketing efforts to a specific demographic, using Infusionsoft’s automated email tool.

Good marketers know that an attractive landing page helps entice more customers. Infusionsoft shows you how to optimize your landing page content and monitor lead sources on your website. With a solid focus on eCommerce, Infusionsoft will help you manage payments and close more sales.

If you’re overwhelmed by your workload, Infusionsoft has the tools you need. The interface makes it easy to schedule meetings, track appointments, and follow up with contacts in only a few clicks. It also includes seamless email integration, so you’ll never miss an important message from a client.

2) HubSpot

As one of the most effective lead generation strategies, inbound marketing can provide tons of organic traffic to your website. An industry leader, HubSpot delivers an exceptional inbound marketing platform that will make your interactions with clients more targeted and personal.

This accessible suite of tools lets you leverage your website, social media activity, and SEO to attract customers and convert more leads into sales. HubSpot provides detailed reports all in one place, and its emphasis on collaboration helps put you in sync with the rest of your team. Not only does HubSpot track website traffic and page performance, but it also provides data on email clicks. This information can help you create targeted emails, segmented lists, and timed posts across multiple media channels.

If blogging is more your style, HubSpot makes content creation easy. It provides beautiful templates, SEO tools, and an easy editor for blogging. The tool also automatically optimizes your blog for mobile devices so that your audience can always find and share your content.

3) Oktopost

If you’re a social media fan, you’ll want to check out Oktopost. Designed to meet the specific needs of business-to-business (B2B) marketers, Oktopost helps you manage all of your social media accounts at once.

With Oktopost, you can schedule posts across multiple channels and measure the performance of your content, including clicks and conversions. This information is essential for determining how well your marketing efforts match your bottom line.

Oktopost is also an expert in content curation. It automatically tracks mentions and suggests links to share, so you always have a way to engage with your audience. Oktopost’s social inbox collects comments on your posts in one place, allowing you to respond quickly to customers.

If you’re interested in Oktopost, you can get started with a free 30-day trial, or you can purchase one of four subscription plans. Buying a subscription provides additional user accounts and more detailed performance reports for your website.

4) SlideShare

SlideShare is a popular multimedia tool that takes content marketing to the next level. Using SlideShare, you can instantly upload presentations, documents, infographics, and PDFs. With millions of worldwide users, SlideShare is the perfect platform for sharing original content and promoting your brand.

As a marketing tool, SlideShare helps improve your reputation with search engines. By creating and posting quality content, you can increase your ranking on Google and drive more traffic to your website.

The most compelling SlideShare presentations offer something of value to their readers. Webinars,
how-to posts, and top 10 lists are especially popular because they are evergreen and easy to share on social media. Images and video clips will enhance your SlideShare content and make it more memorable for your audience.

Your presentation should be on a topic that is relevant to your business. It should also include a call to action that points readers to your website. SlideShare can help you generate a lot of great leads, provided you consistently produce high-quality content.

Online marketing tools put your business on the map

There’s no denying it—the marketing world moves quickly. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to leverage the right tools. With these four services in your toolkit, you’ll build brand awareness and nurture your leads more effectively than ever before.