It might sound pretty simple, but optimizing your brand on Facebook is actually quite important.

The biggest temptation is to cram every possible keyword associated with your business into your fan page name. Actually, not only will your chosen name sound contrite but will also look pretty darn spammy. Once you come across as spammy, people will start running away and literally hide any of your updates from their feeds.

In turn, if you get to general, you will washout because that particular name or word is used by thousands of other businesses, you’ll washout. Try looking at the first two words within your title. These are what will capture Google’s attention.

Fan Page Vanity URL:

Once your fan page has attracted 25 likes, Facebook allows you to create a unique URL or username for that page. Because this is holds weight with search engines, it’s important that your fan page reflects your business. If by some happenstance, someone else has already claimed your name, make sure you include what your business is about in the URL.

Strategic Locations for Keywords on your Fan Page:

Keyword optimization is most fundamental in regarding SEO, just as it is on a website. Your “About” area, your “Mission” and business “Description” are elements pulled from your fan page.

How Search Engines Index Your Page:

Your fan page name is your SEO Title
Your fan page name and your About section are your Meta Descriptions
H1 sis your fan page name.

In order to optimize your page for local searches, it’s extremely important that you add your Address, City, State and Zip Code. For searches about your products, your Company Overview, Mission and Product fields should be filled in with appropriate information.

Consider adding a brief 140 character description about your fan page. The whole message will display in search engine snippets.

Indexing Your Brand for Local Search Engines is Crucial:

Many business never seem to include their telephone numbers or addresses believing the majority of their sales are taking place online and not in a local brick and mortar. Indexing your brand for local search results is crucial for the overall growth of your Facebook fan page.

Backlinks to Your Fan Page:

The more inbound links to your page are extremely important according to Google and will help you rank higher. This is very important to bloggers who are linking their content from other websites and blogs.

Write Something Optimizes Updates:

When you post an update on your fan page, the first 18 characters serves as the meta description. Take advantage of this option when Facebook suggests you “Write something”. Adding a direct link to your business website in your updates is a good idea as well. Google considers the first word of your update extremely important. Therefore, you may want to make that a keyword.

Facebook Notes:

Facebook notes gives your fan page the ability to create multiple pages underneath the main page. This is a great way to add special offers and events you business might be hosting. This information is also indexed by search engines.

Overall:

Using these methods on your Facebook Fan Page will help boost your SERP ranking, increase product recognition and increase your following growth.

The post How To Optimize Your Facebook Fan Page Without Going Crazy appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

•  Who are your true competitors?
• Where are you planning on taking your business in the near future ?
• Where and how are you targeting your audience?

If you don’t have the answer to these questions, it’s time you did. You cannot start a successful SEO campaign until you clearly understand the internet world around you.

Do You Really Know Your Competition?

Before you can truly answer this question, you must understand the significant difference between online and offline competitors. You might consider a local competitor not a particular threat, but do you know what their business presence is online? They might well be a bigger threat then you have given them credit for. If they have developed a solid presence online, having done so for sometime, they are most definitely a threat. If searchers are finding your competition quite easily, but not looking for your business directly, you’ve got a problem.

On the other hand, big businesses that dominate the offline world, might not have an impact online. Therefore, your business has a great opportunity to move ahead of this competitor with the right SEO.

Dig a little deeper and see what implementations your competition has taken before starting your SEO campaign. What keywords are they targeting? Have they been actively involved in link building and for how long? Do they have a strong social presence? Knowing what your competition is up to will help you narrow down their weaknesses and how, through SEO, you can take advantage of these flaws and develop a stronger SEO campaign for yourself.

Where Is Your Business Going?

This is an extremely important pre-SEO question you must ask yourself. Before you can start actively pushing your SEO campaign, you need to know what is in store for your particular brand:

What is your particular niche?
What product line are you selling?
Who and What is your target audience?
What are you really selling?

Having a clear vision regarding your business will help a great deal when starting your SEO campaign. SEO is long term, your strategy should not change every few months. You will never get enough momentum in order to see true value if you are constantly changing your strategy.

Where Is Your Target Audience?

In order to draw visitors to your business, you need to know where to find them. What social sites are they active on? What blogs are they reading? Are they into forums? SEO is only a small part of your marketing campaign, making your website visible to those looking for your particular niche.

What services or products are these people looking for and how will your particular brand benefit them over your competition? Once you discover your audience and understanding what makes them tick, will give you guidance with your SEO. Your marketing content, social media marketing, link building are important actions toward your visibility.

Pulling It All Together – The Best SEO Campaign:

Once you have a clear understanding regarding your competition, your business expectations and who your audience is, developing your SEO campaign should move along quite smoothly. Nothing is totally set in stone, there will be adjustments and tweaking in the growing process. Know your own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your competitors and that can help you act accordingly and build a strong SEO Campaign.

The post Pre – SEO Campaign Questions and Answers: appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

It doesn’t matter what your particular niche is, whether your are a plumber or a pet-sitter  a blog will bring your clientele if you do it the right way.

A Maid Service Site: By posting valuable information on cleaning tips and tricks could actually bring a great deal more business.

Although there is great potential in having a blog, many owners feel they do not have the time, experience or inclination for setting one up. It’s time to shake off some of these negative thoughts and look at why you should have a blog.

My Competitors Feel the Same Way — So Why Bother?

Because your competitors feel the same way is exactly why you should jump on this opportunity and move to the front of the line. Engaging your customers or future customers can create growth while your competitors sit back and procrastinate.

Viewers Love Blogs

In this day and age, the internet and blogs can decide the growth or downfall of any type of business at any given time. A good blog offers great content that draws readers back for more. By exposing your readers to your particular business, you are offering important information and entertaining them along the way. Whether you have a brick and mortar business or an online business, readers want to know why they should come to you for their particular needs.

We Are Connected Even More Then Ever Before

Believe it or not, only 4 or 5 years ago we were not using cell phones to check out Facebook, read the latest world news or watch videos on YouTube. Five years ago you were not reading your favorite James Patterson on a tablet!

As technology has matured and reinvented itself, so has the Internet. People moving around the internet have also evolved to a higher maturity and their expectations are vast. As a business owner, never fool yourself into believing that potential clients are internet novices. This could not be further from the truth, they download videos, check out the latest news online and socialize on Facebook.

Building Better Customer Relationships is a Win — Win

Developing a good blog is individualizing your business and increasing your customer traffic. You probably have letterhead and business cards that reflect your professionalism and style. But where is the personal connection between your customers and your business?

Do you know that the majority of customers who purchase from a brick and mortar business found out about them online? They visited their blogs, connected with them on Facebook and Twitter and discovered great products through word of mouth — online!

A blog can help you express yourself and your brand, while focusing on things that unite you and your clients.

It allows current clients and future clients to connect back with you. By leaving comments, feedbacks and socially sharing everything about your business. The beauty is, this can go on 24/7 and you do not need a staff of people to make this happen.

With a blog, you can offer great information about your business and/or product while letting others know what you are all about. Connecting with your readers, allows you to brand yourself while meeting the needs of customers. By posting valuable and interesting information, you are building a loyalty with your readers. Loyalty translates to word of mouth and repeat customers.

The Evolution of Technology

The technology of products and devices has also evolved over the past few years. You can set up a free platform blog or integrate your blog with your business site. There is a vast array of platforms to utilize from in order to get just what you want. Using videos, audios, text, images, etc., there is an unlimited supply of business growth opportunities.

Blogs and their applications have come a long way as well. You can publish posts from your phone, access your blog remotely and setup dates and times, in advance, when a post should publish. You do not have to be techie to setup a blog anymore. It’s easy to setup and to manipulate to your specific needs. If there was ever a time to start blogging, it’s now.

How and What to Blog

Writing and publishing posts does take a little time during the day. Once you figure out what you want to write about, things will fall into place and become easier with each passing day. Reading up on how to start a business blog and getting involved in social media sites will give you something your competitors are overlooking — it’s called growth!

The post Why Your Business Needs A Blog? appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

How to promote your YouTube video?

Your  Video’s Title and Description:

If you want your video to be found, it’s important that you create an SEO-optimized title, using good keywords.  You should also give great thought to your SEO description.  You do not want to “stuff” your description with keywords, just include main keywords that draw interest.

If you have a blog or a website, you should include the link in the description that directs back to your site.  If you are on social media channels, you can also incorporate these links as well within your description. 

Make sure your main link is always above the Show More section.  Most people will not have an interested in clicking on Show More but will click on your main link.

Maximizing Your Tags:

Tags are your keywords and are critical in order for your video to be found.  After a few weeks, check out your video in order to find out how well it is being viewed.  If activity is slow, change out some of your  tags and see what happens.  When using long tail keywords, always make sure they are within quotes.  This will get searchers to include the entire phrase within their searches, instead of single words.

Example:  “hand-made leather dog collars”

 Pinterest:



If you are not a member on Pinterest, join!  Pinterest is growing in leaps and bounds and is a perfect place to get your videos seen.  Brand your videos that you have on your channel because Pinterest allows views to actually watch the videos directly on their site.  Other Pinterest members can share your video on their pages as well.  Pinterest is an invaluable source for getting your videos out and seen by thousands.

Share on Facebook:

Whether you only have your Facebook profile or have a page dedicated to your site, you should share your video with people.  As others share your videos with their friends, your videos will go viral.  If you are posting a video about your business, make sure you tag them in your post with the video link.

Share on Twitter:

Again, you want to get a link to your video out to all your Twitter followers.  If your video includes a business and product, you want to include their Twitter handle.

Example: Arlo hand-made leather dog collars are long lasting fashion statements — http://company#name/*&^%dogs(*&&collars

Google +:

As Google owns both YouTube and Google +, they kind of go hand in hand, so be sure  they both like your videos.

LinkedIn:



LinkedIn leans toward business related subjects.  If your video is about a specific business and product, you will want to share it on LinkedIn.  Using LinkedIn can have an impact on your business’ growth.

Reschedule Your Videos:

When posting on Facebook and Twitter, it’s a good idea to reschedule them to release once a month over a period of time.  If you are promoting affiliate products or other companies, it shows these businesses that you are looking to maintain a good working relationship with them.  It also gives your video fresh new life every month.

Video Response:



If you find a video that is similar to your own video, create a video response that will attract that audience to you.

Blog Posts:

When creating your posts, embed your YouTube videos into those posts.  If you want Google to love your site, this will get their attention and improve your ranking.

Here are a few ideas for promoting your YouTube video.  Always look around for more innovated ideas that can attract viewers.  Whether you have your own business and products or are an affiliate marketer, videos will play a huge role in your overall success.

Excited viewers of YouTube videos are potential purchasers, so get as many people as you possibly can to checkout your hard work.

The post Promote Your YouTube Video appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

Keyword

Specific keyword can directly impact the kind of search phrases your site gets pulled into and influences more targeted visitors to your site.

Choosing and testing variable keywords can be a bit time consuming, but in the long run it’s well worth taking your time.

Example: “dog accessories” is a large and very general keyword search. “hand-woven dog collars”, on the other hand, becomes quite specific. This gives targeted searchers exactly what they are looking for.

The best way to decide which keyword work best on your site is to check your conversion rate.

Keywords with the highest conversion rates are usually the most profitable for your business and therefore should be utilized. That does not mean that all high conversion keywords will work well on your site just because they work well on paper.

Take your time and play around with various keywords, run them for a month and see what kind of conversion rates you are getting. If a keyword that seemed to be a high conversion just doesn’t pan out, dump it and move on to other keywords.

Looking back at “dog accessories”, this keyword phrase might only convert to 7%, but how much more traffic is your site getting and how many conversions does that 7% mean to your business? “Hand-woven dog collars” might bring visitors that are going to move along in their buying cycle faster and might be easier to convert into paying customers, but you still have a large potential of leads from “dog accessories” in your sales funnel! You will have a larger pipeline to work with and a larger potential for sales.

The data from keyword conversion rates are handy for testing new keywords, but don’t rely totally on this information for making your final decision for the best keywords on your site. You need to look at the entire picture when it comes to SEO. Keep digging to find the best solutions for the success of your business, including your keyword choices.

The post The Importance of Keyword Conversion Rates appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

Here are some easy to do link building tips for small businesses that won’t take a great deal of time to accomplish:

Claim Your Local Business Profiles:

Claiming your local business profiles on as many sites as possible is important for potential customers to find your business and contact you. Some of the most popular places to claim your profile are, Google+, Bing Local, Yahoo Local and Yelp. These sites are also an excellent source of quality links. With the ever growing popularity of mobile searches, local business listings makes it a great deal easier for customers to find your business with their phones and tablets.

Partnership With Other Local Businesses:

Unlike link exchanges, building partnerships with other local businesses creates cross-promotional opportunities. Building a partnership with other local businesses, of similar niches, is a great way to promote one another and build your local presence on a broader scale.

Be Heard on Local and National Business Blogs:

Commenting on other local and national business blogs is a great way to get links for your link building campaign. Reach out and converse with other business owners, this will lead to sharing links and boosting your business credibility. This will allow you to connect with a wider audience, keeping your link buildingdiverse.

Grab the Attention of Local News Sources:

As a small business owner, the chances of a large news source, like the New York Times, chasing you down is pretty slim. That doesn’t mean you can’t grab the attention of smaller, local presses to get some new coverage. This is a great way to promote business sales, special events, etc. There are also a great source of online news sites that will run a short story about your business and even holiday specials coming up.

Write a Blog Post and Promote It Through Your Social Profiles helps link building:

Content marketing will escalate your SEO and leave a lasting impact. As busy as your day might be, it is well worth taking an hour or two a week to write these posts. Making a habit of writing posts will get search spiders to visit your site and give search engines more content to index. Indexing content will increase search results, giving targeted searchers a reason to interact and visit your site. Visitors to your site might well share your links on their social networks and other media sites. This is an excellent way to tell search engines your content is quality and valuable.

Added Thoughts:

Many small business owners are totally overlooking the importance of link building. It plays an extremely valuable part in the growth and prosperity of any small business. Taking some time out of your busy schedule and focusing on link building will reap terrific rewards in the long run.

The post Link Building Tips for Small Businesses appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

Blog

Good Questions Regarding Your Blog Content:

Are your posts loaded with information not easily accessible else where online?
Are you writing about what people are looking for?
Are you offering information that will help others in one way or another?
Will your readers leave, feeling they have learned something new?
Are you staying active on social media sites?
Are you building a relationship with other blog owners and your readers?

What Is Google Looking For Regarding Blog Content?

Google’s sole purpose is to find what people are looking for and sites that are delivering what searchers are seeking. Let’s take a closer look at what attracts Google’s attention:

Smile For The Camera:Is your blog pleasing to the eye ? Do you have a unique, custom design, limited advertising and are your images shareable?

Appealing oes your site offer a welcoming atmosphere? Are you active on social media sites and offer blog interaction? Does your blog have others talking about it?

Friendly: Will readers find your site user-friendly and easy to leave comments?

Intelligent: Are your posts meaningful and helpful to others? Are readers learning something from your content?

Unique: Do you offer a rare and individual flair with creative content?

Are You Listening: Care about the searchers and not the search engines. Are you giving readers what they are looking for?

Integrity: Google hates cheaters and manipulators. Stay away from copyright infringement, illegal activities and hateful content.

Sincerity: Do you “believe” in what you are writing about? Readers will know the difference between passion and popularity.

What Is It All About: Are your posts simply a cover-up for advertising or built around keywords? Is your site loaded with links for making purchases? If your site is loaded with nothing more than advertising and purchases, readers will turn tail and run!

Positive Attitude: Make sure your posts are positive and upbeat. A really good blog should also be family friendly.

Choose Your Friends: Are you linking with sites that are in the grey zone? Unsuitable and holding bad reputations? If so, it’s time to look for a new crowd to hang out with.

Infomercials: There is absolutely nothing wrong with making money with your blog, many do. Just make sure you are giving more than you are getting. Quality should always come first.

I Happen To Like Me — Do You? If you don’t like yourself, you can’t expect anyone else to. Create posts that you also enjoy reading and truly hope others will also.

Love Your Readers: Show your readers that you really care when they leave comments. Take a minute and answer them! Also, sign up for Google + You can follow others and add a share button to your blog.

Google is looking for blogs that are loaded with personality and are so very easy to fall in love with. Take a good look around your blog and find ways of improving its personality to the outside world- you might be pleasantly surprised when Google turns around and says: “I Love You.”

The post How To Get Google To Love Your Blog appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

SEO is great unless you are dealing with a site that is on its last leg.

Paying attention to content that will attract visitors and offering great links are the key to a solid foundation and something you can work with.

Many social media gurus will tell you SEO doesn’t matter, search traffic just happens. Well, if you produce unique content and make your site easily accessible, you can draw some decent traffic. Unfortunately, the right search traffic doesn’t just happen, it takes knowledge in telling search engines what you are about and that your product is something people are looking for.

What Are Visitors Looking For?

Content: Create great content by giving people what they really want. Once you have quality content and visitors — sharing and links will follow.

Accessibility: If search engines can’t access your content, your page cannot be indexed or ranked.

Visitor’s Experience: Your site must be easy for visitors to navigate through, in order to share you content with others. Visitors do not share content that is difficult to access, that’s just SEO savvy.

Marketing: One of the most important aspects to getting your site known is through word of mouth. Promoting your site is probably more important than just about anything else.

SEO Copywriting:

Copywriting is the meat and potatoes when it comes to the news media. You want to optimize everything in the best way possible. So let’s look at some of the essential elements for good copywriting.

The Title:

What phrase of keywords in your title will put your content up front and draw readers? Placing your significant keywords at the front of a title is better, it will capture the attention of those looking for specific information. People will zoom in on search results that are using the keywords they are searching with. This also grabs Google’s attention that your content is, in fact, the particular subject these people are looking for.

Meta Description:

Everything is not just about ranking, it’s about the representation of your content to search engines. Your meta description should be “peek” into what your content is all about. This in turn will influence whether a searcher clicks on your site or not.

Your meta description should be under 165 characters in order for the full description to become visible to search engines. Using WordPress allows you to create a meta description directly in the posting area, using Thesis or All in One SEO.

Content:

Your content is extremely important when it comes to making search engines happy. It cannot be emphasized enough, unique and fresh content are key in rankings. Your content should always be on target and centered on the subject matter of your keyword phrases.

Keep your body content around 300 words. Shorter than that will not draw the attention you are looking for. Too long will lose the attention span of most readers.

Whether including keywords in sub-headers will improve ranking is debatable. It is just common sense to include your keyword phrase in your sub-headers because that’s what the page is about.

The Frequency of Keywords:

“Keyword frequency is the number of times your targeted keywords appear on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the words on the page.”
It makes common sense that keyword frequency has an impact on ranking, but keyword density most likely will not. The only way to evaluate your keyword frequency is via the ratio of those keywords to the rest of your content.

The best way to evaluate the repetition of your keywords and whether they are really good or total spam, is to measure the frequency against the overall length of your page. If your density is greater than 5.5%, you are probably walking in spam and could be penalized by Google. Overloading your keyword repetition will not increase your ranking, it could potentially give you negative results.

Page Links:

Page linking is fundamental to a quality website. Search engines want a heads-up that your links are correctly connected to other pages and contents. This is search engine optimization. Here are a few pertinent linking practices that are quite acceptable within your content:

Link to relevant information early on in the body of your copy
Link to pages of importance, approximately every 120 words of content
Link to Interior pages that are relevant to your site or other sites
Link to anchor text that is naturally relevant

By covering important elements of SEO for good optimization using structure, keywords, fresh and unique content will give your copy the attention and ranking it deserves.

The post SEO Copywriting — Getting It Right The First Time Around appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

Why Your Website Should Be Mobile Responsive:

With new technologies in phones and tablets, the number of people accessing the internet using these devices are soaring through the ceiling. Your website must be ready for this massive flow of traffic in order to succeed.

Your website must be able to flawlessly accept multiple devices to meet the needs of future prospects and customers. Mobile has taken over in both work and play environments and there are no signs of this platform slowing down.

Negative Experiences Are Bad For Business:

Visitors to your site want easy access and an enjoyable experience from their phones and tablets. Unfortunately, visitors are constantly dealing with:

Pinching and constantly tapping to get a good view,
Dealing with tiny fonts that are impossible to read,
Clicking the wrong area and being removed from what they have been reading and Poorly laid out sites due to horrible designing.

WordPress Mobile Responsive Themes:

Copy-blogger’s WordPress theme division has come up with the easiest solution for turning your website around, without breaking the bank. You do not have to spend endless hours trying to figure out coding only to end up with one huge mess.

What’s In It For You?

No expensive application development and maintenance to deal with
Your website will work each and every time on phones and tablets, flawlessly
You do not need a secondary mobile site to spend more money on and maintain
No need to update or deal with poorly designed mobile plugins.

Mobile Responsive Themes will give you the freedom of only one website to serve every device and you will have one unified, optimized site for search engines. You will also have all SEO benefits of publishing to the internet.

Taking the Work Out of Technology with WordPress:

Simplicity is the keyword. Create great content and hit publish — that’s it! These WordPress designs literally do the rest for you. Your site will automatically display correctly for your visitors every single time.

Mobile devices are everywhere and it’s up to website owners to meet the needs of these devices and visitors. Mobile responsive themes are the future for website designs and WordPress will be right there offering easy to implement, easy to use designs for the success of your business needs.

The post Build a Mobile Responsive Website with WordPress appeared first on Cardinal X Inc..

After 6 months of growth, something seems to come to a slow pace, it’s like their B2B SEO has just slammed into a brick wall. Visitor traffic just is not what it should be, nothing significant is going on with their lead generation. So, what’s going on?

If your B2B SEO campaign has appeared to hit the same brick wall, it comes down to this — content or should I say the lack of content.

SEO is forever changing and evolving. Tactics that worked five years ago, just aren’t cutting it today.

Like many businesses, website owners are struggling and are trying to understand why what worked before is now unsuccessful. This is not to say that traditional link building tactics are no longer important, but a great content marketing campaign is imperative. Without this campaign to push your website and brand along, your B2B SEO campaign will never reach the levels of success that it should. Without content, your campaign will undoubtedly stall.

Fresh content grabs the attention of and attracts search engines. Search engines will constantly revisit your site and index new pages in SERPS. Search engines provide the best experience possible in order for searchers to receive the most applicable information possible.

The more informational content you place on your website or blog, the better results search spiders can pull for users. In other words, the more effort you put into your B2B SEO, the more you are helping out search engines.

Always remember that individual pages, not websites, are what rank with search engines. Every blog post, article, white paper or webinar you publish, has great potential to rank in search engines.

In the SEO standpoint, it helps expand your online brand. The more places visitors can interact with your business, the better.

The more fresh content you create, the more long tail keywords you can target. Long tail keywords may not have a great deal of search volume, but they will drive more targeted visitors to your site. Therefore, when your content ranks well for long tail keywords, you are reaching the right audience that is that much closer to making a purchasing decision.

Fresh content is the key to propel your B2B SEO campaign forward.

* Fresh content gives you the opportunity to target new keywords and variations. Since Penguin went live, anchor text can target different groups in your targeted audience.

* Fresh content drives many B2B social media marketing campaigns. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are just as enthusiastic about content as search engines.

* Fresh content is the key to B2B SEO and constant growth that can prevent your business from hitting stone walls.

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