Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an extremely valuable tool to give to your clients so that their business capabilities are enhanced and so that they have a greater chance of succeeding through their online business capabilities and interactions.

Please forgive the constant repetition of the phrase “Content Is King”; however, truer words were never written. The way that you and your business will succeed through your social media interactions is with your content. Of course, it goes without saying that your content has to be well written, exciting, and informative. The fact is that you have tremendous capabilities when it comes to providing your clients with valuable content. The big question, now that you have the content to share with your clients, is how you truly give them what they want and need in order for them to succeed in their businesses.

Find out what they want and need

Sometimes the most simplistic approach is the most effective one. When it comes to clients, the majority of them won’t mind if you ask them what they want. In fact, it will probably make them happy to know that you are definitely putting their needs first by asking them how you can solve their problems. A great first step when it comes to gathering information about what your customers want and need is to send them a survey (through a free survey tool like Survey Monkey or Zoomerang). Once you have signed up for one of those services, you will need to create some questions, such as

• How can you help them to run their business more effectively?
• What do they consider the most valuable among your products and/or services and why?
• Exactly what do they lose sleep over when it comes to their business?
• What improvements would they like to see when it comes to your business offerings?

Your questions should be clear and concise and, of course, they should focus on the needs of  your particular target market. There is nothing worse for the recipient than long-winded and/or numerous questions. You may also want to consider offering an incentive as a reward for taking the time to answer your survey (such as a discount coupon, free gift, etc). This will make your clients happy and it will cause your relationship to grow stronger. 

The responses to your survey

After you have gathered the responses to your survey questions, you need to study them very carefully. Be prepared to receive both positive and negative comments. As painful as it may be to receive negative comments, you should be open minded and use them as a learning and growing experience for your business. Those comments may make you aware of an issue that you didn’t know existed. You can’t fix something that you don’t know about. As a result, you will be improving upon your existing offerings and presenting superior products and/or services. You should ask yourself the following questions based on the results of the survey:

• What additional services can I provide to my clients based on their feedback from the survey?
• What specific changes can I make to what I am offering?
• How can I fulfill my clients’ needs in a unique fashion?

Once you have come up with answers to those questions, it will be time to take action. With the feedback in mind, you can provide effective and helpful content that the search engines will love. The content should contain what offerings from what the clients asked for. If you are at all unclear about how to focus your content in that direction, your hints are in the feedback from your clients (look for the strongest and most prevalent keywords and key phrases).

SEO content writing results

After you have formulated your plan and have added the effective content to your website (or other elements of your web presence), you need to find out if what you did was effective.  Keywords and key phrases are at the heart of what is important when it comes to content and SEO. The way to truly measure the results is by looking at an analytics tool (such as Google Analytics). This will tell you where the clients are going.

Once you have identified that information, you will be able to understand what your clients want and need. There is no better source than your clients to know what you need to do in order to make them happy.

Conclusion

SEO is an extremely important and useful tool when it comes to the success of your business. It isn’t just an acronym that people utter with no strength behind it. It is a critical part of your business’s success when it comes to online interactions and online relationships. The more valuable the information that you share with other people  is, the stronger and more long lasting your relationships will be. That also means that the quality of your SEO must be top notch. Of course, that will ultimately translate into more success.

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If you have a website or are researching websites, you’re sure to have heard the term SEO bandied about quite a bit. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO techniques are used to improve the visibility and ranking of a website when people conduct a search on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Generally speaking, the higher on the search page that a website displays and the more frequently a page ap­pears in searches, the more visitors it will receive from search engine users. How optimal is it to appear on the first page of a search? Very. Up to 42% of search users click the top-ranking link, as few as 8% click the second-ranking link. Click-through rate (CTR) drops thereafter. Sixty-two percent of users click a link on the first page of search results, 23 percent go to the second page.

The drive to come up on the first page of a search — and in the first, second, or third place — is one determined by traffic and relevance and can be an expensive one. Most small businesses may not be able to justify the time and money spent to come first in search engines that continually change their algorithms, and to outrank simi­lar, larger companies with more traffic. However, there are some things you can do that will help.

First Steps

When optimizing a website, you must first consider how search engines work and what search engines are used more often by your target customer. Also, think about how people conduct a search. What actual search terms might they enter when searching for a business or ser­vice such as yours?

The next step is for you, or your website developer, to edit website content to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to be sure everything is properly coded to remove barriers that may prevent search engine “spiders” from crawling through and indexing your site. Since effective SEO often requires changes to the HTML source code of a website and to a website’s content, SEO tactics can, and should, be incorporated into web design and development.

Five Things You Can Do for Better SEO

1. Title Tags – Each page should have a unique, descriptive title tag. A description relative to the content on the page helps people who are searching for you, your product, or your services.

2. Content – Content is King. Unique, infor­mative, and relevant site content helps SEO. Use keywords within that content that you feel best describe your business and will be words customers will search for when look­ing for services that your business supplies.

3. Links – Build working links between the pages of your website and with other trusted websites. Ask business affiliates and other trusted businesses to link to your site as well. You should also use Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs to create links to your website and encourage followers to visit.

4. Keywords – When your website developer lists keywords in the HTML files of your pag­es, be sure that those same words appear with frequency in the content on your site.

5. Updates – Fresh content will bring search engine “spiders” back to index your site, and will bring your customers back as well, so update your site as frequently as possible. You may want to update some pages once or twice a month, and others less frequently. The more traffic you receive, the higher you will come up in searches.

Conclusion

SEO is a critical part of online business success. If your content is not recognized and ranked highly by search engines, people will not be able to find you and if they can’t find you, they won’t be able to interact with you. It is those relationships that eventually lead to greater success for you and your business.

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If you have any knowledge of what makes your web presence successful and effective, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of it. There are different tactics that you can use. On-page tactics and off-page tactics.

If you use a combination of the two, you will most likely see that they are great in combination and before long, you will notice a marked improvement in the volume and the quality of the traffic that is being drawn to your website. Before anything else, it is very important to understand the differences between the two and to learn to use them most effectively for your business.

On-Page SEO: With On-Page SEO, you optimize your content, use internal links, and meta-tags. A meta tag is a tag in HTML that is inserted at the top of a web page primarily to describe its content and to provide keywords for use by the search engines.

Off-Page SEO: With Off-Page SEO, you use backlinks (links that lead back to a particular web page or blog), social media, press releases, posting on forums, etc.

Write blogs and submit them to bookmarking websites

Blogs are becoming more and more important for your business. Blogs draw search engine crawlers to come to your website more often and they help you to generate a greater number of backlinks by syndicating your articles to various websites and directories. There are numerous bookmarking websites from which to choose. Whichever ones you choose will most likely be a good choice for generating traffic to your business. Some of the more popular ones are

• Stumbleupon
• Delicious
• Digg
• Mixx
• Reddit
• Propeller
• Technorati
• Yahoo Buzz
• Kaboodle

Besides the bookmarking websites that were just mentioned, there are many more that you should research. Only you can really decide which ones are the most appropriate for you and your business.

Get involved with forums and discussions

If you ask a few questions and post a few comments a day, you will spark discussions from many other people who are as interested in the topics as you are. People love to give their opinions about all sorts of things. The amount of time that you will invest in the questions and comments will be very little and the amount that you get in return from other people will be much larger by comparison. Your return on investment (ROI) will be wonderful. One thing that you need to be cognizant about is that the responses that you give to others online are intelligent, informative, and interesting. It is important that you are making a worthwhile contribution that is benefitting other people. It is never good enough to post merely for the sake of posting. Always bear in mind that you are building your trustworthiness and credibility. If your online contributions are not of value, it won’t help you at all. In fact, it may totally work against you if you don’t contribute valuable information. Other people may view you as a spammer.

Complete your social media profiles and share news updates with your online communities

You should start by establishing profiles on the most popular social media channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter). It is very important for you to put all of the appropriate details into your profiles so that people can start to get to know you. The more you share with them, the more they will get to know  you and the more they get to know you, the more they will want to interact with you online. Once you have established a presence in the various social media websites, there are some steps that you need to follow when you have published a new blog article.

• Update your status update on LinkedIn and Facebook
• Tweet about it on Twitter
• Share your article on forums and discussion boards
• Post a relevant photo on a website such as Flickr. On many occasions, photos are more effective than words

Rewrite and redistribute articles

Many SEO companies are hiring people to rewrite the same articles with slightly different twists. The articles are then distributed very widely and are syndicated to bookmarking websites. Because of the fact that the content has been revised, the search engines regard it as original.

List your articles in local business directories

The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) allow business owners to list their business with complete details (name, address, phone number, etc). This will enable more local traffic to come to you. You should make sure that your business is listed with all of the local listings websites for optimization.

Conclusion

The techniques that were mentioned here are used often and with great results (universally). It is critical that you use every available technique to increase online traffic to your website and this is an excellent way to do it. Of course, the more traffic you drive to your website, the greater your chances will be of acquiring more clients and of doing more and more business. Off-Page SEO is what allows your website to be ranked by the search engines. A search engine presence is critical to the success of your business. You should make sure that your SEO efforts are very precise and effective so that they work to your advantage.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a free assessment of your online presence, let's have coffee.

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Keywords are essential to your business. Without appropriate keywords, people won’t be able to find you because the search engines won’t list you. Therefore, if you want your business to succeed, you must use the most relevant keywords possible.

It is true that search engine optimization (SEO) can be a little frightening and it can be overwhelming to try to come up with effective keywords that really work well for your business. So, you might ask yourself how you get started on choosing amazing keywords. A methodical approach will probably work best for you and if you take it one simple step at a time, you will see that you will achieve positive results.

The following are simple steps that you can incorporate into your keyword approach:

• Search for your brand: It is extremely important that you understand where your brand falls in the search engine rankings. Your objective, in this case, is to force your competitors’ rankings to fall below your rankings. You want your brand to appear as high up on the first page of the search engine as possible. If you are at the top, nobody else can be. You want to own that spot. Additionally, you need to ensure that all of the terms that are connected to your brand (such as brand-specific product names) also appear at the top of the page.
   
• Gather suggestions for keywords: There are keyword suggestion tools that will help you to obtain a list of top-quality keywords. You can obtain this by entering relevant keyword and your competitors’ URLs into the tool. Remember to make sure that you include a variety of different terms (head terms, mid-terms, and long-tail terms). Head terms are terms that get less than 1,000 monthly searches, mid-terms are terms that get between 100 and 1,000 monthly searches, and long-tail terms are terms that get less than 100 monthly searches.
   
• Beat out the competition: You should identify the keywords of your competitors by including their homepage URL to your keyword suggestion list. Then you can compare their keyword list against yours. That is an easy way to identify if you have missed any important keywords.
   
• Hone your keyword list: Hone your keyword list by categorizing in by search volume, relevancy, competition, and present status. Your objective should be to choose 10 keywords that are part of your SEO strategy. Those words should include your brand name and four other relevant keywords. Your choices should be only the keywords that are extremely relevant to your business. You can look at the specific words that are already ranked in the search engines. It is easier to begin if you have a running start. An important thing to look at is your global monthly searches.  Think in terms of conversion. Try to picture people searching for those terms in the context of your website and try to determine if they could actually be converted.
   
• Develop a strategy to rank your keywords: Once you have your established list of keywords, you can create your SEO strategy around those terms. You need to watch the terms over time by monitoring the patterns of the rankings and by gauging exactly which type of traffic you are receiving as a result of those terms.

Conclusion

In as much as SEO requires a lot of effort up front, the results will be long term. Keyword selection is critical to the success of your business’s success when it comes to your SEO strategy. The keywords will make all of the difference. If you do it correctly, uncomplicated SEO can positively affect your website traffic and your brand awareness will increase exponentially.

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Many people have a website. Fewer understand if their website is actually effective. Having it assessed to answer that question is an excellent idea. It is important to be prepared for the assessment with intuitive and effective questions.

Every website is a little different than the next one. They are all unique because the objective for each one is slightly different. The quality of the website must be as high as possible in order to win over the competition. With the volume being so great, yours really must stand out and be remembered by others so that they return to you over and over again. If you don’t achieve that, you won’t be able to generate the traffic that you need in order to bring more leads, customers and business. It is never enough merely to have your website built. Once it exists, you must be meticulous and consistent about having it maintained so that the quality constantly lives up to your standards.

Before you have your website assessed, there are a number of different features that will be looked at. The questions that you begin to ask should bring you valuable and accurate information so that the assessment is most effective.

• Is it easy to navigate your website?
• Is your website aesthetically pleasing to others?
• Is your website useful to other people?
• Do you have top-quality content on  your website?
• Do your web pages load very quickly?
• Is your content appropriate for your target audience?
• Can your visitors contact the administrators of your website if they wish to do so?
• Do all areas of your website function properly and effectively?
• Will  your website hold up against competition online?
• Does your website show up in the top of the search engine results page (SERP)?
• Does your website adhere to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines?
• What is the conversion rate for your website?
• Which code is being used when building the website?

You need to think about your website as a business tool. When you are building your strategy, It is just as important to massage, cultivate, and grow your website as it is to cultivate the rest of your strategy. Always remember what a tremendous asset it is and will be for your business. It is a critical part of what you are trying to accomplish professionally.

Conclusion

If any of the answers that were given to any of the questions above were not satisfactory, there is work to be done on your website. The first step is your assessment, which should be done by a person who performs website assessments for a living. The assessment should turn up problem areas before any recommendations can be made. Several tools will probably be used to make the assessment. The tools should include Google Analytics (or some other analytics tool) as well as other online assessment tools. The more effective the assessment, the stronger your website. The stronger your website, the better your chances of increasing your business.

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You have a great idea for your startup company. The idea of going into business for yourself has been brewing for a long time and you are finally ready to jump. The name of your company is key.

When it comes to choosing a name, you shouldn’t become obsessed but at the same time, you should understand that the most appropriate name is an extremely important part of your business and can definitely be a contributing factor when it comes to the success of your business. If the name that you have chosen for your startup is not the best, you may want to rethink that and rename the company.

Another thing to bear in mind when choosing a name is that you only have to pay for the name once and you will own it forever. It is important to be satisfied with what you have chosen so that you don’t have to go through the hassle at any time in the future of having to choose again. Additionally, if you have to change the name of your company, the longer you wait, the more expensive it will be.

There are many thoughts and factors that are important when it comes to choosing the name for your startup:

• A description of what you do: The name should reflect what you do and what your startup stands for. A simple name is usually the best choice because it is easier than a more complicated name to remember.
   
• A legal name: It is very important that you make sure that no other company has the same name as you have chosen and that the name is not trademarked to that other company. An easy way to find out if your name is unique is to go to uspto.gov.
   
• A single-meaning name when spoken: Make sure that whichever name you choose cannot be interpreted more than one way when spoken out loud. An easy way to tell this is to tell someone the name of your startup and ask them to repeat it to you. You will be able to tell easily if there is any ambiguity in the name.
   
• A single-meaning name in the search engines: If the name that you have chosen sounds like some other word, it will be harder for people to distinguish the name.
   
• Your domain name can be obtained: When you try to register your domain name, you should have chosen a name that has not been registered by anyone else yet and can be purchased by you for a reasonable price. Your domain name should be simple, memorable, and should not have any punctuation in the middle of it. You want people to be able to type it easily. Also regarding the domain name, make sure that you get a name that has the .com extension and not .net or .org. The reason why this is so important is that when people type in your company name and hit enter, it will go directly to your website. It won’t happen that way with the other two extensions.
   
• A short name: A short and simple name is best. The longer your company name, the more letters other people will have to type when they are writing about you and your company. When it comes to people tweeting about you, remember that there is a 140-character maximum for each message. You want to take up as little room as possible.
   
• An available Twitter  handle: You should try to choose the simplest Twitter handle possible (and a handle that is as close to the name of your startup as possible).
   
• An available Facebook page: A great way to test this is if you go to http://facebook.com/yourname. See what happens after that. You can also do a search on Facebook and see what comes up.
   
• The first letter of your company’s name: The first letter of your company’s name should be a capital letter. The reason that this is important is that a lot of people will misspell the name of your startup if you have it starting with a lowercase letter. That won’t be good for your business. There is an interesting theory that if you want to raise a large amount of money for your startup, you should give your company a name that begins with either an “S,” a “C” or a “T.” 
   
• Vowels and consonants: Make sure that you give your startup a name that sounds like an actual word. It will cause fewer problems for other people.
   
• Work in the main keyword: If possible, try to work in the most important keyword for your startup into your name. This is very important for search engine optimization (SEO) and it also lets your website visitors get a sense of what your business has to offer.
   
• The meaning behind the name: A common question that you are likely to get from people when they learn the name of your startup company is what is the story behind the name. It is something interesting that people will remember about you and your business. 
   
• Classy vs trendy: When choosing a name, it is best to choose one that is not trendy. The interesting thing about trends is that the words lose context and meaning after the trend has run its course. It is best to choose a name that will be meaningful throughout time.

Conclusion

When it comes to starting your own business, there are so many seemingly inane elements that are actually significant. They require thought and if chosen correctly, they will make a tremendous difference to the success of your business. The name is one of those and when choosing that, you want to make sure that it is on the tips of everyone’s tongue all of the time.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.

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It is common knowledge that online video marketing should be an essential part of your social media marketing campaign and your online videos must be optimized for search engines in the same way as your other online content.

Interestingly enough, one piece of helpful advice that the experts don’t seem to share often is about learning to use SEO techniques in your online video marketing campaigns. If a video marketing campaign is truly effective, often it has a way of going viral, which is exactly what you want when it comes to your marketing campaign.

“How to” videos are a sure way to increase your website traffic. It is an excellent idea to include a call to action toward the end of your video to draw people to your website. You can include the call to action right in the thumbnail of the video.

Once you have optimized your video, you should embed it in your website. It is a good idea to have a separate page on your website for every video that you share with your viewers. Make sure that you have good-quality keywords connected to that video. You should be consistent regarding your description of the videos and post the same one on Yahoo! Video, YouTube and Google Video or any other video website that you use.

High-quality video SEO advice

When you begin to upload a video on a video website, such as YouTube, a form will appear with some choices for you to make. You will type in your video title and you will give a short description of the video as well as tags in the tags column. When it comes to video SEO, those are the three most important pieces of information. Once a person searches for your video, you will be able to see the results with the keywords that will appear in bold in the “Title” and “Description” columns of the results.

It is also very important to use the same link-building techniques as you do with your website and blog with video marketing. One good way to work in a link to your video is to encourage other bloggers to put it in their blog postings. You will find that there are many who will be happy to do it.

Choosing keywords for your video

You need to choose the most attractive and the most appropriate keywords to promote your online video. Before you can choose the best keywords for your video, you need to do some research to know which words are the best for your purposes.

• Begin by listing words that you feel are the most closely connected to your video in the text editor.
   
• Either open a tab or a new window in your browser and go to YouTube.com.
   
• Open another tab or window and go to YouTube’s Ads Keywords Tool.
   
• Choose one keyword or key phrase and copy and paste it into the YouTube.com search bar and click on “search.”
   
• Then, go to the tab that you opened in the Ad Keywords Tool. The tool gives you the ability to target a specific country and language. Your default is the “United States.” Next, you will type your keyword in the box and click on “Get keyword ideas.”
   
• In your results, you will see the number of times your keyword or key phrase (in other words, search term) is searched on average in a month. After that, you should go to your search results from your search on YouTube.com.
   
• You can determine what and who you are up against by reading the number of results that are returned (in the top right hand corner) based on your search term and the number of people who used the same search term in the titles and descriptions of their videos.
   
• A good way to reduce your number of competitors and reach more viewers is by combining keywords. Your new keyword combinations will make them unique. This will make your keywords more valuable and will bring you more valuable viewers as well.
   
• Once you have completed your search, it is a good idea to go over your keywords again to determine if you have forgotten any. Additionally, you can use related search words, which you will see below the results of your search. You will find those suggestions to be helpful.
   
• Another great way to get people to notice your video is to put your website link in the video. If your video is lengthy, you may want to seriously consider dividing your video into short segments. You will, in effect, be creating a series of videos that will entice people and not only interest them in continuing to tune in until they have seen your entire video but also in compelling them to visit your website.

Conclusion

Online video marketing is an extremely important part of your social media marketing campaign. Optimizing your video’s title and description will give you the results that you are looking for: more viewers, more subscribers to your video, and eventually, more targeted and prequalified website traffic.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Driving traffic to your website is critical to the success of your business. There are many ways to drive traffic, including the use of on-page tactics and off-page tactics. This article will define both but will focus on off-page tactics.

In the past, the search engine optimizations (SEO) experts would concentrate on the content and structure of websites, on-page SEO. The biggest concern at the time was making sure that the clients’ websites were set up correctly with the right meta text, page titles, placement of content, names of images, etc. Nowadays, the definition of SEO means a great deal more than it did years ago. At the moment, the search engines’ indexing spiders are now looking for activity rather than back links.

SEO is divided into to three categories:

• On-page SEO: optimize content, keywords and key phrases, meta tags and internal links
• Off-page SEO: back links, social media, press releases, forum postings
• Off-page Paid SEO Services: Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Adwords
  (we don’t endorse this category and, therefore, will not discuss it here)

SEO is the process of improving the quality or volume of traffic to a website from search engines via natural or unpaid (organic or algorithmic) search results. With that in mind, you might be wondering why so many people are writing about off-page SEO since the term really doesn’t mean anything.

There are many ways to drive traffic with off-page SEO tactics, including:

• Publishing blogs/press releases, news and submitting them to bookmarking websites: Most members of the online community realize the importance of blogging and new updates on business websites. They attract search engine crawlers to visit the website more frequently as well as helping to generate more back links by submitting those articles on press release and bookmarking websites. Many bookmarking websites have cropped up lately and the vast majority of them are an excellent source for generating traffic for your website. Some of the more popular ones are Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Kaboodle, Technorati, and Clipmarks.
   
• Get involved with forums and discussion boards: If you want to drive a great deal of traffic to your website, this is an excellent way to do it. A quick and easy way to reach the other members of your online community is by asking a thought-provoking question or posting an enticing question. In the beginning of your traffic-generating campaign, if you spend 20 minutes a day on forums for two weeks, you will start to see a significant increase. Of course, it goes without saying that you need to make sure that your responses to comments are as enticing as the original content that you posted. If you don’t do that, you will be running the risk of being labeled as a spammer and possibly being banned from posting altogether.
   
• Create your full social profile and share news updates with your online community: You should start with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You need to create a comprehensive profile on those social media channels for your business. You will need to sign up and you will be provided with a URL of your profile. That is your social profile. Once you have created a profile on those social media channels, you need to start engaging people in the following ways:
  • Tweet about your business on Twitter
  • Do regular status updates on Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Syndicate your blog articles on discussion forums and boards of several social networks
  • Use Flickr to post an effective photograph or photographs about your business, products and services. People love to see graphics accompanying the article that they are interested in reading
     

  Once you have set up your social media profiles, the next step is inviting other people to connect with you.
   

• Article rewriting and distributing: The latest thing to do is to take an article that is already written and rewrite it as a different version. You can then start distributing the new, rewritten version to numerous bookmarking and press release sites. The search engine crawlers will consider your content as original and will index it as always.
   
• Local business listings on search engines and in yellow pages: The major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing allow business owners to submit the details of their business (name, address, phone number, etc). This is tremendously helpful in getting local traffic to your website. You should make sure that your business is listed on all local listing websites, such as Hotfrog, Business.com, Superpages, Merchant Circle, and Google Places.

Conclusion

Driving traffic to your website is an extremely important part of the ultimate success of your business. Whether you like it or not, SEO is key to that success and as a business owner, you have to play by the rules of the Web. There are many different ways to generate traffic to your website. One thing to remember is that you must be consistent with the amount of time and effort that you dedicate to working on your web presence, including traffic building and back link building.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications> for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO), even after so much time, is still somewhat of an enigma. You are bombarded with information and you need to know exactly what to do so that the search engines love your website.

There are many things that you should do and many things that you should not do when it comes to having your website optimized for the search engines.

Dos

• Do target the best keywords: It is very common to target the wrong keywords. Even professional search engine optimizers make that mistake at times. Marketers will often choose keywords that they think describe and explain their website accurately. However, the average online searcher generally does not think in the same keyword terms. Picking the best keywords will greatly affect your SEO campaign. In fact, if you don’t choose the correct keywords, your SEO campaign will be worthless. The wrong keywords will mean that you won’t achieve high rankings in the search engines and you won’t increase your business revenue.
   
• Do implement a Robots.txt file: The main reason for using a robots.txt file is to have complete control over the data that are indexed by serachbots. You should implement a Robots.txt file only on the occasion that you want to avoid unwanted web pages from being indexed. A Robot.txt file should always be placed in the root folder of your website where the searchbots will be able to access it easily.
   
• Do perform competitive intelligence: Before you even begin your SEO campaign, you should visit competing websites that rank the highest in your searches. The types of questions that you should be researching are:
  • What kind of social media is being used by the top-ranking websites?
  • How many back links do the top-ranking websites list?
  • How old are the top-ranking websites?
  • How many websites are in competition for the same keyword?
  • You should definitely take full advantage of Google Analytics
     
• Do include long-tail keywords: There are millions of websites that are competing for short tail keywords. If you go the “short-tail keyword route,” it may take you up to 6 months to rank in the top 20 for a competitive keyword. This is when long tail keywords are useful. Long-tail keywords are those low-volume, obscure, infrequently searched-for keywords that turn up in your search query reports. ‘Web design strategies for traffic generation’ is one example of a long-tail keyword. ‘Web design’ is not. Long-tail keywords are very specific and can contain the name of your specific brand, product or city. It is pretty easy to get long-tail keywords ranked and the conversion rate is better than that of short-tail keywords. Definitely include keywords in your title tags.
   
• Do write fresh content: If you publish duplicate content, the search engines will probably penalize you. With plagiarism being so widespread, along with the sophisticated content-checking tools that can easily detect if content is not original, marketers are becoming more cautious. You should contribute fresh content to your website so that you generate the interest of your website visitors and so that you also build your credibility with the search engines.

Don’ts

• Don’t use flash for SEO: Websites that use Flash are very attractive and eye catching; however, the search engines cannot read or index that type of content. If you feel that you just can’t avoid a website that is built around Flash and you need the search engines to index it, you will need a second version of your website that is done in html. The reason that search engines don’t like Flash is that a spider cannot read Flash content and thus, can’t index it.
   
• Don’t use an overabundance of JavaScript: Searchbots are not built to read JavaScript code. If a website should happen to contain a few lines of JavaScript code, most likely the Searchbots will be able to ignore the JavaScript code along with the text. The less JavaScript code you have in your website, the better. If you must have a website with JavaScript code, you should create an external JavaScript file.
   
• Don’t link to low-quality websites: Link building is an integral part of SEO. The search engines view the number of links that come into a website as an indication of how popular the website is and rank it accordingly. Many novices don’t realize that the links from credible and high-quality websites are so extremely important and the novices mistakenly link to low-quality websites for higher rankings. Unfortunately, the result of this can be that the website with the inferior links can lose some of its credibility. The worst-case scenario could be that the website will be banned by the search engines.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization and search engines are extremely important when it comes to the success of your online presence and how successful it is for your business. It is essential that you avoid actions that will detract from your credibility, your position as a subject matter expert, and the strength of your online presence and reputation. If you use the tips here on what to do, you will start to achieve even greater success in your business and you will expand your online network and build more and more relationships. Remember, if you choose to hire an SEO organization to optimize your website, you need to make sure that the SEO organization is reputable and that they will do the best job possible when it comes to optimizing your website.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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People think that a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant can get you top rankings in the search engines because you pay him or her to do so. There really is no guarantee of that. Blogging, however, can make a difference.

Increase your search engine rankings

A much better, less expensive and more effective thing to do is to blog to increase your SEO rankings. An SEO consultant will basically get you started with getting to know the appropriate technology and/or he or she will help you to identify the most effective keywords that you should be targeting. You can just as easily learn how to do all of that on your own.

When it comes to learning the technology, if you begin using a good-quality blogging and content system and you add a few popular plugins that will enhance the basic system, you will be on your way to creating effective and useful content that you will be able to share with many other people and that will increase your rankings in the search engines.

Give of your time

The most significant investment that you will be making is your time. If you are able to set aside a few hours a week to post some helpful news items or your opinions on timely and relevant subjects in which you are an expert and do it on a consistent basis, you will see positive results before you know it.

It is not necessary to post lengthy blogs, in fact, other people often have no patience or time to read long pieces. The more relevant the material that you post, the greater your chances will be of moving up in the search engine rankings.

Whatever you are selling, people will always appreciate tips and advice that they can relate to and that will help them to solve their problems. A good way to start to reach out to people in an effective manner is to search online for questions to which you know the answers.

Blog commenting

When you search, you should look for mentions of problems on other people’s blogs, Facebook and Twitter pages and message boards. When you post a comment that addresses one of the problems, you should always include a link back to your blog. Make sure that your comments are well thought out and always try to contribute as much value to the conversation as you can (above and beyond merely posting a link).

The more you comment on other people’s blogs and the more you encourage them to comment on your blogs, the more valuable content will be generated and the more traffic will come to your website. This, in turn, will positively contribute to increasing your rankings in the search engines. When you are looking for blogs on which to comment, you should go with blogs with a high volume of traffic with relevant content that will, in turn, give you a large amount of traffic right away or strong PR blog comments that will allow you to leave SEO optimized anchor text. You should use your blog comments to increase website traffic as well as offsite SEO back links.

Helping others

Remember that you should always put the needs of the people with whom you are connecting online above your own needs. Connecting online (through blogging or in other ways) is not about direct self-promotion. It is about finding ways to help other people, building new relationships and maintaining relationships that already exist and interacting with people on a consistent and frequent basis.

Another very positive way in which blogging will help increase your search engine rankings and your website traffic is by providing fresh content on a regular basis. When you do this, you are keeping your readers updated on everything that is going on and you will be creating an interest in them that will hopefully last for a very long time.

Conclusion

If you always show people that you are more interested in helping them than you are in helping yourself, they will want to continue to build a relationship with you and eventually, they will also be interested in buying what you are selling. Your blog articles should always offer useful and meaningful information that tries to satisfy the needs of your readers. As the relationship develops, your readers will trust you (because they have already gotten to know you well) and find you to have impeccable credibility.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

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