SEO Advice for Small Businesses

Robin Good of MasterNewMedia did two interviews with Massimo Burgio on the basics of social media marketing. I was interested to hear Massimo say that the one thing he would advise Robin to write more about is search - what people most need is information about search engine optimization.

And this is borne out by a survey of Top Marketing Trends for 2008 of 1700 MENG (Marketing Executives Networking Group) members, conducted by Anderson Analytics.Almost half of those polled said SEO is top of their list for 2008.

It struck a chord with me. I get questions about SEO all the time.

Start with Keyword Research

In order to have effective SEO you must know what keywords you are after. You can use Digital Point (still free) or Nichebot (now charging a fee) to help you find the words and phrases that will bring you targeted traffic.

Type in the word or phrase you think you'd like to get found for. Then go through the list and see what other related words and phrases they have - and how many people search for them each day.

You'll be surprised to find that there are other phrases that could get you good traffic. When you have chosen a phrase go to Google and type it into the search engine. See how many other sites are competing for this phrase. You might want to start with one that is not very competitive.

A content strategy based on keyword research is the best way to get good results from your SEO actions.

Resources:

WebSense: effective internet marketing strategies for entrepreneurs

Content Strategy Workbook

An effective website marketing strategy should include blog and RSS feeds

Sally Falkow

There has been a lot of talk about where website marketing is headed in the next few years. While 2004 may have been called The Year of the Blog, it was not until the summer of 2005 that this trend really took off in the corporate world. You can hardly swing a cat without running into a blog seminar or workshop.

Now enterprise use of content syndication is heating up. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or web feeds, as many prefer to call them, are attracting the attention of corporate marketers.

What’s so special about RSS feeds?

They leverage your site’s most valuable asset, content. It makes it easy to display high-quality, relevant news on your site, and to syndicate your news and content elsewhere. You can use an RSS feed for a variety of content: product news, press releases, technical articles. The list is endless.

The number of people reading RSS feeds is growing by leaps and bounds. Feed Burner, a service that republishes feeds for clients to increase distribution, reports that subscriptions to the feeds they manage are growing by one percent a day. People who read feeds are the ones you want to reach—they're opinion leaders and early adopters.

When planning your website marketing strategy for this year, be sure to include blogs and RSS as part of your marketing and promotion tools.

Blogs make sense for website marketing

In an article in the SEO blog today, the advantages of blogging for business are highlighted.

"There are two major advantages Blogs offer search marketers. The ability to link Blog entries together to form an information-thread network provides search marketers with a number of tools beyond the improvement of the knowledge base. "

Blogs, if maintained properly can be an important component in an effective website marketing strategy

Your Website Is Part Of Your Marketing Strategy

Many people look at a website as a separate expense from marketing. This is unfortunate and the reason why many websites under-perform in their sales potential, says Stoney deGeyter in a good article in ISEdb today

Unfortunately, far too many businesses still don’t consider website development as a part of their marketing efforts, he writes. They’ll pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (which often produce significantly less return on the investment dollar) but fail to properly plan and execute their website or invest in effective online marketing strategies.

I couldn't agree more. Too many budgets have line tiems for all manner of marketing ideas, yet the website was thrown together years ago and now stagnates online. While the reast of world hurtles towards the 'live web' filled with constantly changing consumer-=generated content, a company website that is a static brochure will not get much traction.

You need to get familiar with the website marketing strategies that will bring you interested traffic you can convert to customers. You need to know who is searching for your kind of content.

WebSense is a website marketing ebook written to help small business owners do just that.

Using Search to Create A Brand

Six months ago no one had heard of shielding lotions. No one was searching the Internet for these words.

21st Century Formulations, manufacturers of the shielding lotion brand name Skin MD Natural, saw the power of Internet search and we worked together on a campaign to create awareness of the category and the brand name.

The content on the site was crafted so it was optimized for the search engines and met the needs of users who came to the site.

Each week we write an article on some aspect of skin care and shielding lotions, backed by scientific research data an endorsements from dermatologists. Using RSS feeds these articles are placed into Google News and syndicated to other news sites.

This month for the first time there are people searching for shielding lotion. Not many - true. But they are there. And when you do search that term the first two pages are dominated by his product.

These articles also created good search results on terms like dry skin lotion, dry skin prevention and dry skin treatment.

Every small business owner can use the power of good content to raise brand awareness on the Internet and reach the people who are searching for their products. All you need is a website marketing strategy

Good content makes for good results in Google

No matter how many times it's said, it remains true - good content is the differentiator. Google rewards good content.

Site Pro News features an article today called Google's SEO AdviceFor Your Website: Content
and draws attention to the fact that the sites that rank high all have excellent content.

If you are looking for a way to improve your web site marketing strategy this year, perhaps it's tine to invest in good content. Find a good writer who know how to write for live people AND search engines.

Or find a book on writing content that can teach your in house writers how to do it.

The success of your website marketing depends on your users' experience

Click Z has two articles about users today - and they both make the point that unless you provide a good online experience for your visitors your website marketing plan may be less than effective In my book WebSense I said that the biggest mistake in creating a website was creating content that fulfilled your needs, not the needs of your users.

A new study from Blast Radius shows that even the top retail sites can get it wrong. The researchers fiound many sites don't measure up to the promises made on the about us page. Drugstore CVS is cited as one example that stands out for its unfulfilled promise to make the "overall shopping experience as easy as possible."

No surprise that Amazon tops the list of the ten best online retail sites. PCMall gets top spot on the worst online shopping site list. Let's hope they get the message and do some user testing before the next holiday shopping spree.

Reminds me of the user testing done by Jared Spoole at UIE. Even when they gave people the money to buy a desired item online only 33% completed the purchase. What stopped the others? Bad content, couldn't find the item, not enough info, difficult navigation. His comment was: When they can't buy, they won't buy. Seems very obvious, yet too many sites don't do user testing.

WebSense: effective website marketing strategies for entrepreneurs explains how easy it is to do basic user testing that will find the major errors on your site.