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Keywords

Yes, keywords are still very important to on page and off page SEO. While Rank Brain is learning away, we do see that with some of our clients sites that they rank for words and terms that are NOT on their site, and are synonyms or LSI keywords. Still, it’s very important to have as many sprinkled throughout your content AND in your backlink profile, (use sparingly for backlinks).

Gabriel Shaoolian recently published an article on SiteProNews.com that touches on a few key elements of keywords:

Failing to do keyword research.

Nailing a keyword list is going to be the bread and butter for your site’s SEO. In fact, you can think of every keyword as a breadcrumb, trailing users to your site. But in order to create a successful list, you need to not only think of the most basic words to identify your brand. These are the words that consumers are going to be using to start their search. But you also need to consider your competitors.

If, for example, you’re a locally-based eCommerce site for specialty foods, such as gourmet cheese, the terms “specialty foods” and “gourmet cheese” are probably first going to come to mind. But how many other sites out there are already using these words? Probably millions. So, you need to take things one step further by creating a long tail keyword. This would be something along the lines of “best gourmet cheese in Denver.” And here’s where our third what-not-to-do comes into play.

Forgetting to localize.

In the above example, choosing to feature one of your specialty foods—cheese—was a smart move in narrowing down the search competition. But smarter yet was the choice to incorporate the name of your city. This step localizes your search terms, an extremely important SEO step, especially for retail brands with physical locations. In fact, 50 percent of Smartphone shoppers, who search locally on Google, end up visiting physical stores on the same day.

If your brand is failing to optimize itself for local searches, you are going to miss out on an entire pool of customers. Most importantly, given their close physical proximity to your brand, these customers are the ones you should be converting into brand loyalists. When creating your target keyword lists, be sure to include local search terms.

Finish Reading The Full Article Here

That’s good content from Gabriel, especially about not forgetting to add Geo modifiers to your keywords. Local is important for most businesses as they don’t serve the entire US but only their local city or county. As Google gets smarter it picks up on users location and will direct them to businesses that solves their search query. In fact, with most searches now when you search for something you will see in Google suggests the “near me” appended to your search term. So don’t forget to localize!

We recommend you check out Gabriel’s article because of his next point being speaking like a human, which kind of ties in with keywords and voice search.

Website Structure

This can be a huge pain in the rear. If you get this wrong in the beginning and don’t address it, it will snow ball. This was covered in an article done by Pratik Dholakiya on MarketingLand.com:

Poor URL architecture

URL architecture can be a difficult thing to fix without breaking other aspects of your SEO, so we don’t recommend rushing into this, or you might do more harm than good.

That said, one of the most frequent issues I come across is a lack of solid URL architecture. In particular, folder organization is often spotty.

A few common issues:

• Blog posts listed in multiple categories, resulting in blog posts listed in multiple folders, creating duplicate content issues as a result.
• URLs with no folders other than the parent domain. While this is precisely the form your most important pages should take, pages further down the hierarchy should be listed in folders to categorize them.
• URLs with folders that are, themselves, 404 pages. If a URL is listed under a folder, many users expect that folder to be an operational page. From an architecture perspective, it’s semantically confusing, and from an internal link perspective, it’s ideal to have links to these pages from a parent folder.
• Junk URLs full of numbers and letters. These days, these are primarily reserved for search result pages and database queries that aren’t intended to be indexed and found in search engines. Your URLs should contain useful information intelligible to a human if you want them to contribute positively to your performance in the search engines.

In addressing these issues, there are two complications you want to avoid: creating 404 pages and losing existing link authority. When you change your URL architecture, you need to make sure that the old pages 301 to the new ones. Ideally, any internal links to the old pages should also be updated, since PageRank is reduced by the damping factor every time it passes through a link or 301.

As an exception, if blog posts are listed in multiple categories, a 301 isn’t always necessary, but in its place you should canonicalize to the preferable page.

Read Pratik’s full article here

His first point is one that we see all to often. A blog post that is listed in several categories resulting in duplicate content penalties. It’s important to note that in every test we have ever done on duplicate content, the only time it ever results in a penalty is when it is duplicate content on the SAME site.

His last point is also another one that can’t be overlooked, not properly setting permalink structure. We do run across this from time to time. We have seen that through updates that sometimes the permalink structure gets changed for whatever reason and must be reset.

Summing It Up

Don’t forget about the basics, they still work. Keywords in your content and backlinks as well as keyword rich titles and descriptions, H1 and H2 tags with LSI’s. Lastly, make sure your permalink structure is correct and hasn’t changed or been altered by mistake.

As always, if you need help with your Local SEO for your small business, visit us at MD Internet Marketing Solutions

The following article Don’t Forget The Basics Find more on: MD Internet Marketing Solutions Digital Marketing

Optimizing Your WordPress Site

There are a lot of factors that come into play when optimizing your site not only for search engines, but customers as well. As search engines become smarter, it does get a little easier to combine your optimization efforts to please both.

If you have followed any of our posts on Web Design, you know that we have been mentioning for awhile that your site needs to load fast. If your site doesn’t load in just a couple of seconds, users will hit the back button to go to another site. Site load speed is also a ranking factor in search engines. So making sure your site loads fast is probably one of the biggest factors in getting the most out of your site. To learn more about how to make your site load faster, see our post “Speed Up Your Site For Better Rankings And UX“.

Website Hosting

The next thing that must be mentioned is hosting. If you have your site on subpar host, then your site will be lacking. In fact it can hurt not only your site load speed, but user engagement as well. “How” you may ask? Well this was just covered in an article by Chris Garret on CopyBlogger and his tenth point:

Hosting with a company that prevents or punishes your success

This last one will catch you by surprise at the worst moment.

You get your 15 minutes (or 15,000 visitors) of fame, only for your host to tell you … nope! Not on their watch.

They shut you down.

There it is, in the fine print of your hosting contract … you’re only allowed a certain number of visitors or so much bandwidth … which means all your new prospects land on a page that says your website is down.

It’s smart to keep your costs manageable when you’re starting out, but losing potential customers because of penny-pinching isn’t so smart.

If you currently have cheap “hobby” hosting, you need to ask yourself:

How many clients or customers can I afford to lose to a bad web experience?

Read Chris’ full article “10 Often Overlooked Website Mistakes that May Harm Your Business“

It’s a great point from Chris. We like how he makes the connection between cheap hosting and “hobby” hosting. It’s true. You need to stop and ask yourself if it’s worth saving a few hundred dollars a year on hosting costs that could literally be costing your business tens of thousands of dollars in sales due to a slow loading site or not loading because of exceeding your monthly bandwidth. Are you running a business, or is it just a hobby??

Next we move onto more things on your WordPress site itself. We have covered about how important it is to keep your site’s themes and plugins updated. “Is Your Website At Risk Of Being Hacked” explains how important these updates are in keeping your site secure. Sometimes these updates can also lead to how well your site performs, or doesn’t.

But what about your site’s database and links? One of our favorite writers, Colin Newcomer, just made a post on WPKube that covers this:

Clean and Optimize Your Database

When you first install WordPress, your database starts off so clean and tiny. But as you start “living” in your site, your database starts picking up all kinds of junk. It’s like dust in your house. You didn’t do anything to “cause” the dust…but it still accumulates and makes everything look dirty.

Posts revisions, transients, table overhead, spam comments, and more do that to your database. Each individual database entry isn’t a big deal…but combined (like those specks of dust), they can make your site a big sluggish.

Thankfully, they’re easy to clean up. All you need to do is run a plugin like WP-Sweep. Nothing to configure – just install, head to Tools → Sweep and clean up your various tables:

You can also Sweep All at the bottom of the page – though I don’t recommend it because you might wipe out your drafts. It’s usually better to go through each category individually to ensure you don’t remove important information.

Check for Broken Internal and External Links

Broken links are bad for user experience and, to a lesser extent, SEO. They make it harder for humans to use your site and robots to crawl your site. They’re difficult to find manually…but with the right tool (Broken Link Checker), you can instantly sniff out every single broken link on your WordPress site.

While the plugin does have some advanced settings, for most sites, you can just install it and head to Tools → Broken Links:

You can hover over each link to quickly edit it or remove the link.

Because some people say that Broken Link Checker can slow down the wp-admin dashboard, I recommend only enabling the plugin specifically when you want to check for broken links.

Read Colin’s Full Article “9 WordPress Maintenance Tips to Keep Your Site Running Smoothly“

Those are some really good tips. However, before adding any plugins to your site, make sure you back it up first as they may conflict with others and cause the dreaded “white screen of death”. We would also advise that with both of these plugins you deactivate them when not in use as Colin points out with Broken Link Checker. This brings us to our last point –

Plugins

One of the greatest things about WordPress are the plugins. There are thousands of them. What you must remember is that “the more the better” rule DOES NOT apply here. Too many plugins will slow down your site, while some plugins are hogs and can really slow things down. As a general rule, we try and stay away from “Swiss Army Knife” plugins that do “everything” for you as they tend to be the worst. Also, the more plugins you are running the greater your chances of having a conflict resulting in again the “white screen of death” or the site not functioning properly leading to poor user experience.

Try and use the minimum amount of plugins as possible to get your needs done. It’s a good idea to regularly check your plugins and if you are not using them, deactivate and uninstall to keep from slowing down your site and minimize the risk of plugin conflict.

Summing It Up

Getting optimum performance from your website really starts with your hosting. With a low cost hosting provider you may be saving a few bucks, but losing thousands in lost revenue due to customers leaving your site before they even see it. Try and use the plugins that Colin recommends to clean up your database and links. Cleaning your database will mostly only benefit your load times, but broken links can not only impact rankings, but user experience as well. Just these few things can have a real impact on how well your site performs.

If you need help with optimizing your website, need a website rebuild, or just need a web design service, visit us at MD Internet Marketing Solutions

Getting Optimum Performance Out Of Your WordPress Site Find more on: http://www.MDIMSolutions.com

How Secure Is Your Website?

You may be the owner of a small business with a small website and think your website isn’t a target for hackers. After all, what would a hacker want with your website? Your website might be just about your services that doesn’t contain any customer information. Why would a hacker even bother with your “little” site? You might be surprised about what hackers can do with your site once they infiltrate it and what they can do.

We are sticklers about website security. We have also taken on customers that have had their site hacked. It’s no fun. Every site that we have dealt with that has been hacked did not have any person’s personal information whatsoever. So why did the hackers bother with these sites?

If you are using our favorite CMS – WordPress, it’s really very simple. It’s all about the numbers. As of last year (2016), WordPress websites accounted for around 26% of the websites on the web. So with over a Billion sites on the web that equates to around 250 million of them being on WordPress. It’s a numbers game for hackers, why not create one bot that can have the most effect and best chances of succeeding.

What Will Hackers Do With Your Site?

What does a hacker want with your site? Install malware to try and infect visitors computers, try and spread their political views, try and gain access to the server your site is hosted on, and probably sometimes, some geek with too much time on their hands.

So how do these hackers get into your site in the first place? A rather large list was made on WPMUDEV.org recently that has some of the most used techniques:

How Hackers Compromise Websites

When writing code, it’s near impossible to not create any security holes whatsoever. When hackers find these vulnerabilities, they exploit them and you’re left with a compromised site.

There are are also other ways a site could be vulnerable including human error such as using passwords that are easy to guess as well as insecure or unreliable hosting.

There are a number of commonly exploited and potential WordPress vulnerabilities including:

• SQL Injection (SQLI) – Occurs when SQL queries and statements can be entered and executed from a site’s URL
• Cross-site Scripting (XSS) – A hacker can inject code into a site, typically through an input field
• File Upload – A file with malicious code is uploaded to a server without restriction
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) – Code or strings are entered and executed from a site’s URL
• Brute Force – Constantly trying to log in by guessing the admin’s account username and password
• Denial of Service (DoS) – When a site goes down due to a steady stream of traffic coming from a hackbot
• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) – Similar to a DoS attack, except the hackbot is sending traffic from multiple sources such as infected computers or routers
• Open Redirect – Occurs due to a vulnerability and it’s a site’s page that’s redirected to a different one that’s set by a hacker and is often spam or a phishing site
• Phishing (Identity Theft) – A site or page created by a hacker that looks like a well-known, commonly trusted site, but is used to collect login credentials by tricking a user to input their details
• Malware – A malicious script or program with a purpose to infect a site or system
  Local File Inclusion (LFI) – An attacker is able to control what file is executed at a scheduled time that was set up by the CMS or web app
• Authentication Bypass – A security hole that enables a hacker to circumvent the login form and gain access to the site
• Full Path Disclosure (FPD) – When the path to a site’s webroot is exposed such as when the directory listing, errors or warnings are visible
• User Enumeration – Being able to determine a valid username to later use for brute force attacks by adding a string to the end of a WordPress site’s URL to request a user ID which may return an author’s profile with the valid username
• XML External Entity (XXE) – An XML input that references an external entity and is processed poorly by improperly set up XML parser and can lead to confidential information disclosure

Read The Full Article “The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Security“

That’s not even the entire list from the post, nor is the post every way that a site can be hacked. As time goes on, hackers get more sophisticated and develop new ways to get into sites to use them as they wish.

How To Keep Your Site Secure

Before you get into a full on panic, there are things you can do to help make sure your site doesn’t fall victim to hackers.

The first thing you can do is make sure you use strong usernames and passwords. Never, and we mean never, use the default “Admin”. Use very long passwords, maybe a snippet from your favorite song and add a few punctuation marks and numbers before and after.

The second thing and probably the most effective is……. KEEP YOUR SITE UPDATED! Whenever there is a new release of WordPress, make sure you install it right away. Whenever you receive an email that an update is available, get it done. But it doesn’t stop there, you also need to make sure that your Themes and Plugins are also kept up to date because they can be just as vulnerable. A classic example of this is the vulnerability in the Revolution Slider back in 2014 where as many as 100 thousand sites were hacked. You won’t receive email notifications for these types of updates, so we suggest checking at least weekly that everything is up to date.

Gail Gardner just posted an article today on another one of our top priorities of keeping your site secure with the importance of choosing a good server or hosting provider:

Choose a Secure Web Host

Web hosts vary greatly in how secure they are. Shared Web hosting is the most affordable option, since you’re sharing server space with countless other websites. But, that affordability comes at the cost of security in many cases.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a middle-ground option where you’re still technically sharing a server with other websites, but you’re each given flexibility as if you were all running on a dedicated server. Dedicated hosting means that you’re the only website on the server, so it of course it comes at a premium.

To provide more security, but still keep costs relatively manageable, many web hosts are now offering managed WordPress hosting, which is similar to shared hosting. But by having them manage the WordPress installation itself, they can help avoid security breaches.

Read Gail’s full post “Web Security More Important Now Than Ever“

Gail also makes some good points in her article about you company’s security policy with employees that have access to your site.

Lastly, we want to point out that you should be making backups regularly. Why? Because if your site does get hacked, restoring your site to it’s previous condition will be a whole lot easier.

Wrap Up

While you might consider your site not large enough, or have important data that hackers may want, it’s still a target. The most important and effective ways of keeping hackers out is to choose a good host, and keeping your site up date to help minimize the risks of your site falling prey. And in case it does fall victim, make sure you have backups!

To learn more about how we help keep our customers sites secure, as well as our web design services, visit our site MD Internet Marketing Solutions

Is Your Website At Risk Of Being Hacked? was
first published on http://www.MDIMSolutions.com

The Do’s And Don’ts Of Video Marketing

Video is one of our favorite ways of marketing our clients to the public. We like video because of the engagement factor over text. However,  some companies do struggle sometimes to get views and get their target audience to engage with their video content and take action. In this short article we will cover what to avoid and what must be done to make sure you are creating engaging video content that converts.

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You may have attempted video marketing on your own, with lack luster results. It can be disheartening. It happens. not every video you create will go viral or be the next dollar shave commercial. Not every video you create is going to be a home run. The important thing to do is learn from your mistakes and keep moving forward with more video content. The good news is that with some careful planning, you can give your videos a lot better chance of being the conversion tool you are looking for.

Two Things To Avoid In Your Video Marketing

Yes, there are some things that you must avoid when making your videos. There are 2 things that we see continually among newbie video creators. One thing that is a must to avoid is making the video entirely too long. This was covered in one of our favorite blogs, Hubspot, where Amanda Zantal-Wiener just wrote about yesterday:

It seems like we’re past the point of requiring evidence that supports the dwindling human attention span, but just in case — studies say it’s about eight seconds. On top of that, roughly two-thirds of consumers prefer video under one minute, so in sum: Keep it short.

I’ll never forget what HubSpot’s CEO, Brian Halligan, said to me during a chat about content creation: “You’re asking to borrow someone’s brain.” When you ask someone to borrow anything, the considerate thing to do is to be respectful of that person’s time, and when they might need it back. Generally, we need our brains — so when you create something like video content, remember that you have your viewer’s brain on loan.

That’s not to say that your video needs to be limited to eight seconds — after all, how much could you possibly say in that amount of time? But when you create it, make sure those first few seconds are highly engaging, as that’s when you’ll need to grab the viewer’s attention to maintain it.

Read Amanda’s Full Article “7 Reasons Why No One is Watching Your Video Content“

She has some good points throughout her article. However when it comes to video length, it can be really hard to get everything you need to say in under a minute. We tend to make our videos between 1 and 2 minutes. Another point that she makes is about not promoting your video on other channels. There is a lot of controversy about this. Some video experts say to create different videos for different platforms. We tend to agree with Amanda and say go ahead and promote every video you create on every social media platform available to you.

The second thing to avoid and that we see as a problem for a lot of “do it yourself” videos is going on and on about how great their company is, or how many awards they have won, or just continually talking about themselves or the company. What people care about is how YOUR company can help solve THEIR problem. It’s okay to tell your viewers about your companies achievements, but keep it very short and to the point. Remember that your marketing videos are to get conversions, so the more you tell them about how using your product or service will simplify or make their lives easier increases your chances of turning viewers into customers.

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The Do’s In Your Video Marketing

Now on to what is important with your video marketing campaigns. We actually found an article that covers the 2 things that we think are among the most important from Colin Newcomer in an article he has on Elegant Themes blog:

Remember That It’s Not Just About View Counts

Many marketers obsess over view counts. Views are the most important measure of a video’s success, right?

Eh, maybe.

There certainly is something to be said for tracking the raw number of views that your videos get. But it’s far from the only metric that matters.

Why’s that? Because you probably want people to actually pay attention to your videos. So to find out how engaged they are, you’ll also want to measure data like:

• Drop-off rates. That is, how many people watch a video to the end? And if they don’t make it to the end, at what point do they stop watching?
• Social shares. Shares are a good metric for how valuable viewers found your content.

So yes, pay attention to view counts. But pay attention to the other stuff, too.

End With a CTA

Fading to black is great for movies…it’s not so great for video marketing.

You would never create a landing page without a CTA, right? Well, it’s the same for your videos. You always want to close by pushing your viewers to complete an action.

So what should you tell them to do? That depends on the goals you set out at the beginning (remember – you should have specific success metrics!).

If you want to primarily boost brand engagement, you might push them to watch other videos by asking them to subscribe and suggesting some videos to watch next.

On the other hand, if you want more email opt-ins, the end of your video is a great time to push them towards your squeeze page or your sales team:

Read Colin’s Full Article “8 Key Elements Your Video Marketing Strategy Needs“

Good article from Colin. Kind of funny that we found it on Elegant Themes site. If you read his full article you also notice that one of his factors is also video length.

We included his article because we find that these things are often overlooked by people producing videos. Many people put too much emphasis on views and don’t pay any attention to other metrics, such as drop off rates. While you video may be getting views, viewers maybe leaving the video at 30 seconds in before they get to a call to action.

Then all to often we see videos with no clear call to action. If you don’t tell viewers to take action, they won’t. Most videos that do have a call to action usually have them at the end of the video. This can be a problem when viewers aren’t watching the video to the end, and why paying attention to the drop off rate is important. This can sometimes be avoided on YouTube with the use of Cards. You can have Cards open up with teaser text and calls to action right inside the video and put them towards the beginning of the video to help increase conversions. The problem with YouTube Cards is that they do not work on every device, so if your drop off rate is before your CTA, your video isn’t converting.

Summing It Up

Keep you videos short and to the point. It’s okay to tell your viewers about your company, but keep it short and remember to tell them how YOU can help THEM. While views are important, don’t forget about drop off rates as this can effect your CTA and your video may not convert as much as you would like. To help avoid drop off before your CTA, and if you are hosting your videos on YouTube, make use of Cards.

If you or your company needs help with video production, just visit our site www.mdimsolutions.com for all of your video marketing needs.

Tips To Get The Most Out Of Your Videos is republished from www.MDIMSolutions.com

 Can Optimizing For Voice Search Be Beneficial?

Voice search from Google has been around for a few years now and more people are adapting to it because of the ease of use over typing, especially on smaller devices. The accuracy of voice search has also increased significantly as of late, making it more appealing to more people. Is it really that important to make adjustments on your site and content for voice search? That’s what we will be answering here.

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According to Google, 20 percent of searches on its mobile app and on Android devices are voice searches. As with almost anything in technology, this number is sure to increase in the coming years. And with “personal assistant” tools like Alexa and Google Home purchases on the rise, it’s a sure sign people like the ability to just speak instead of type.

Why Do People Use Voice Search

Why do people use voice search? Simple answer – it’s easier, especially on mobile devices. Almost every person can speak faster than they type, and not get aggravated trying to type on small screens on their phones. Research does indicate that these are the top reasons, and more, that people prefer voice search which was covered by Nate Dame on Search Engine Land:

While familiarity with personal assistant technology will encourage more people to try voice search, it is convenience that will really drive adoption. The top reasons people use voice search are almost all related to improved user experience.

People use voice search because it’s faster, simpler and more user-friendly. It simplifies searching for individuals who struggle to type on small devices, and it helps searchers avoid navigating confusing site menus. It’s also faster than searching by text, guided by improved accuracy in the technology.

And that’s not just people’s perception: Google’s voice recognition technology is now 95 percent accurate — improved nearly 20 percent since 2013. On average, humans can speak more than three times as many words per minute as they can type. If voice recognition is just as accurate as typing, the speed of voice search provides a compelling justification for adoption.

Voice search provides a better user experience, particularly on mobile devices. Given that 90 percent of executives use mobile devices to conduct research before making a purchase, it’s not hard to imagine that those executives will transition to voice search — not to mention the next generation of B2B buyers who are growing up with the technology as second nature.

Read The Full Article “Voice search and SEO: Why B2B marketers need to pay attention now“

Good points from Nate. It’s important that you the reader take note of his last paragraph about executives, that 90% of execs use mobile before making a purchase and that they too will soon start using voice search. For that reason alone you should want to ensure your site is ready for voice search.

So how will this affect businesses and search? This is a really good question, and if you stop and think about the possibilities, it could possibly change the entire landscape of search marketing.

This was actually covered in a post by Megan Hannay in Search Engine Land just a few months ago:

Most who do believe in a voice-dominated future are in a love/hate relationship with the idea. Some predict we’ll lose all local organic space to ads. Others foresee a future in which anything less than the No. 1 rank is worthless. I see both conclusions as an incomplete picture.

A recent Moz study demonstrated that only 3.4 percent of Google local searches result in ad clicks. While it’s possible to anticipate a future in which voice search results are entirely paid ads, the fact that consumers seem to largely prefer organic suggests that Google would have a hard time retaining customers with such a model.

Imagine if Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” search were a paid ad spot — who would click that button? Replacing the organic “best” option with the highest bidder changes our perception of the result. For businesses, this is further encouragement to tap into the power of organic local reach via accurate data and local knowledge sharing.

Additionally, I think it’s a fallacy to assume that instant answers will beget a world where only the lucky top-ranked result wins. Rather, as I’ll show in this post, voice will make filtering for exactly what a consumer wants a much simpler process. So instead of a single No. 1 rank for a given local keyword (e.g., “divorce lawyer Los Angeles”), there will be dozens of No. 1 pages based on the other parameters a searcher indicates in her query (“a female divorce lawyer within a 20-minute drive from my office in Los Angeles who has experience in custody cases and pre-nups, with at least a 4.5-star rating and who can meet during my lunch break this week”).

Read Megan’s Full Post Here…

That’s a good read from Megan. When we at the office started brain storming about the possibilities of voice search, we have to admit that we did think that it could really wreck organic search results. However, Megan makes a strong case for multiple page 1 results based on the searcher’s query. In any case, voice search is another trend that must be addressed for local businesses.

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How To Optimize For Voice Search

Chances are you have been optimizing your site for regular search. 2, 3 maybe 4 keywords together. For a longtime we have been big fans of optimizing for long tail keywords to target more queries. If you have been following our advice, you are ahead of the game.

Seth Nickerson just made a great video about how to actually start optimizing for voice search that includes using long tails and more:

Summing It Up

Now is the time to start optimizing for voice search. There is plenty of evidence that this trend is going to grow, and if you don’t optimize for it, your competition that does will beat you to the punch

If you are to busy to implement this or any other Local SEO tactics, contact us at www.MDIMSolutions.com for a free consultation.

Should You Optimize Your Site For Voice Search? was
first seen on http://www.mdimsolutions
.com/

Site Speed Effects UX And Rankings

For quite some time Google has been informing the public that site load speed is a ranking factor. The problem is a lot of site owners have no clue how to speed up their site. In this short article we’ll cover a few actionable tips to get your site up to speed and better rankings.

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In our last post under the web design topic, we wrote about how using a CDN can help speed up your site. Because site speed is so important to both rankings and UX, we thought we would expand further on site speed. Honestly, we could have put this post under the local seo blog because of the ranking factor, but since it’s a little more technical, we opted to place it under the website building, design and development category.

First up, lets just cover the FACT that site speed IS a ranking factor to Google. They actually made this public statement about site speed and rankings:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

Read The Full Article “Using site speed in web search ranking“

That article is straight from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog – all the way back in April of 2010, over 7 years ago! Now that can put to rest any doubt about site speed and it’s effect on rankings

UX Site Speed And Bounce Rate

A lot of people don’t realize how site speed and UX tie together for rankings. If someone clicks a link to your site and it takes more than a few seconds to load, most people just hit the back button to look elsewhere for the information they are hunting. This actually counts against you twice.

The first is obvious, you have lost a customer to someone else. The second is that to the search engines, you are giving a negative bounce signal, which means the person performing the search wasn’t given the info they were searching for on your site and decided to search elsewhere. That negative bounce signal can be increased if you are using Google Analytics on your site.

How Do You Speed Up Your Site?

There are a lot of things that come into play when it comes to how fast your website loads. The first that we have mentioned before is where your website is hosted. Where your website is hosted alone can make a HUGE difference in page load time. Cheap shared hosting just won’t cut it. We feel that hosting is such a big issue we will cover it more in depth in an up coming post.

There’s a whole slew of things in the backend of your website to help improve performance. David Manng just wrote a post today that gives great info about how to get more speed out of your site and a few of the techniques that we also use for our customers site’s:

Optimize every single image

A common warning you’ll see when you test your site is that your images are not properly formatted. Maybe you’re using high resolution images when you don’t need to, increasing the page-load time needed to download your images. Compressing and resizing your images to fit your web page can reduce the file size without noticeable quality loss.

The type of image matters as well. It’s recommended to use a JPG for photographs and PNG for everything else. As modern sites become more image heavy, this recommendation becomes more critical. One tool we’d recommend to compress individual images is Optimizilla. If you want to do a crawl for large images on your site, try Screaming Frog.

Leverage Browser Caching

Every time a user visits your site, they are requesting files from the server. If they are revisiting, you should allow them to reuse the local files that are stored in their browser. This will reduce the amount of downloads and make one less request to the server, resulting in a faster page load time. You can do this by marking files to update at different times. For example, a logo is unlikely to change so you can mark that to update less regularly.

Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Minifying one of these resources is the process of removing unnecessary data without affecting how the page loads in the browser. By compacting the code, you save data and speed up downloading time.

Read David’s full article “How to Improve Page Load Speed Performance“

David gives a lot of great tips in the article. One of the biggest speed factors that we see for clients that come to us with an existing website is the point he makes about images. We would add that proper image size is also important, especially if your are using WordPress. Many times we see on site pages an image that is 400×400 pixels, but then when the media library is inspected the image is a whopping 1500×1500. Now WordPress is being slowed down by having to resize these images while loading.

In David’s article he also recommends GTMetrix and Google’s tool for checking site speed. We found another speed tool that we like – https://tools.pingdom.com

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Good News For WordPress Users!

A lot of David’s tips from above can be difficult to achieve for newbies. We actually ran across an article from WPMUDEV about the new release of a plugin that can help with solving site speed problems:

Got a serious need for speed? Satisfy it – for free! – with Hummingbird. We’re excited to announce today that our speed optimization plugin is now available to download at WordPress.org.

Hummingbird is the ultimate performance optimization plugin for WordPress. Once activated, it scans your site for potential speed improvements and provides fine-tuned controls for file compression, minification and browser caching. Not only does Hummingbird make your site faster, it also helps you improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score!

Fast AND Free!? Pinch Me, I Must Be Dreaming

You may have noticed we’ve been looking for ways to give back to the WordPress community and what better way to spread the love than by sharing some of our favorite tools!

Well, everyone’s making a big deal over pagespeed because it is a BIG DEAL. Slow pages have visitors bouncing faster than a rabbit in heat and if your site isn’t optimized to load lightning fast you can kiss your dreams of ranking on the front page of Google goodbye.

Read Their Full Article And Download The Plugin Here

This looks really promising, while we will have to do some testing on a few of our own sites to make sure it does what it says it will and doesn’t break sites. We do have to admit that we were a little confused by the name “Hummingbird”, thinking that it was going to be something that talked too, or tickled Google’s Hummingbird update.

Summing It Up

If you have been ignoring how fast your site loads, you better start giving it some thought now and taking action. Even if you aren’t driving traffic from Google, but social media or other avenues, visitors to your site will not tolerate slow loading sites. We’ve given you a few actionable tips through a couple of trusted sources to help get the job done. One word of caution, before making any changes to your site – MAKE A BACKUP of your site, just in case things go wrong.

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Speed Up Your Site For Better Rankings And UX Find more on: www.MDIMSolutions.com

What And Why Your Company Website Needs A CDN

You may or may not have heard of CDNs before. There are a lot of important parts to your website, especially if it’s the life blood of your business. However, a CDN can be considered an important external part of your site. In this short article we will cover more on what and why you should be using one.

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What is a CDN

CDN – it stands for Content Delivery Network. What it actually amounts to is other servers across the web that contain your website and deliver your site content to a user remotely closer to the user that your website is hosted on. That was a little confusing Here is a better definition from Webopedia by Vangie Beal:

A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and a content delivery server.

This service is effective in speeding the delivery of content of websites with high traffic and websites that have global reach. The closer the CDN server is to the user geographically, the faster the content will be delivered to the user. CDNs also provide protection from large surges in traffic.

Read The Full Definition Here

Her first sentence explains it better than we did, with less words. We wanted to include the second paragraph as well because this is another great advantage of using a CDN – and that is speed and security.

By now you should now that how fast your website loads is not only a ranking factor, but better for the end user also. Your customers will not wait 7 to 10 seconds for your website to load. While proper construction of your website has the biggest effect on site speed, a CDN will help improve speed even more.

Smart Insights did an article that goes more indepth about CDNs and the impact of site speed:

Speed

Remember, if you ignore speed, you will be ignored… Speed is a ranking factor for Google.

If it takes time for Google to crawl your content, you need to re-work on the speed. Speed makes a huge difference when it comes to page loads. If you are slow, users will engage less with you.

Statistics from recent studies indicate that one in four people discontinue browsing a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load…
Seriously, this is something to be worked on.

Content that loads more slowly will get fewer visits.

Reports indicate that mobile devices lag behind in customer engagement metrics due to low speed. Nearly 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages stretch beyond 3 seconds to load. Wait time not only affects performance metrics, but it can be costly for the companies too.

Amazon recently revealed that an extra second in loading its content page will cost the company close to 1.6 billion in sales. With more than 244 million active users, Amazon constantly tries to optimise its presence with a special focus to reduce the load time of its content.

Be it games, software, advertisements, mobile or website content, ecommerce etc., the speed of delivery marks success. CDNs play a huge role in achieving this.

Read The Full Article “How to use CDNs to increase your site speed by 200%“

We wanted to give you that snippet just in case you didn’t believe us about how important speed is to your site. Those are crazy numbers from Amazon and how much just ONE second of extra load time cost the company 1.6 BILLION! Granted, you are probably not running a site as large as Amazon, but you should take into consideration the same things they do for a successful online presence.

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CDNs For Website Security

This is a subject that we are adamant about, Site security. Hackers can do a lot of damage whether they are gaining access to your site or DDoS attacks.

How it helps with security. David Attard wrote on SitePoint about some statistics and how your site will be safer by using a CDN:

Your Website Will be Safer with a CDN

The next reason why a CDN is essential for your website is security.

Did you know that more than 51% of the web’s traffic actually comes from bots rather than humans?

When I first saw this report, I was completely taken aback: (See Info Graphic)

The even scarier statistic from the above is that 29% of web traffic comes from malicious bots.

That means your website is constantly under a deluge of bad bot traffic. If you’ve ever taken a look at analytics data, or used a security plugin like WordFence, you’re already aware of this fact.

These bots are constantly probing your site for vulnerabilities. If you slip slightly in your security efforts, if you have not chosen a good WordPress host, or if you miss a WordPress security update or a plugin update, rest assured your site will soon be suffering the consequences.

Most CDNs are able to identify and block bad bots rapidly, making your site safer when plugged into a CDN. The collective knowledge gained by the network can be used to prevent attacks on your own sites.

Read “4 Reasons to Use a CDN for WordPress“

Good article from David. He also gives the same reason earlier in his article that it helps increase speed. He also goes on to talk more about DDoS attacks. DDoS stands for “distributed denial of service”.

The way we like to explain DDoS goes like this. Let’s say you actually have a brick and mortar store. Then you have a competitor that doesn’t like you. This competitor pays a bunch of people to stand outside in front of the door, not allowing customers to get in. This is the basic premise of a DDoS attack. A bunch of computers or servers all going to your site at once. Then your regular customers can’t access your site because your hosting server is overwhelmed by the DDoS attack. A CDN will help eliminate this threat.

Summing It Up

If you didn’t know what a CDN is, you do now, as well as why you should be using one. Speed and security are the 2 biggest in our opinion. You can either setup a free account with someone like CloudFlare, or get a paid account with someone such as Amazon CloudFront, or a host of others. We have everyone of our clients on a CDN.

For more on how we build and design websites, visit our site. Until next time

What Is A CDN And Why You Should Use One was
originally published to MD Internet Marketing Solutions
Blog

What Does It Take To Rank In 2017?

We get this question all the time. In reality, there are a lot of variables that come into play, and what it will take to get your site highly visible in search results will vary depending on your location and niche. However, there are a few things that you MUST do to establish a foot print on the web and give your site an edge.

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SEO has been around a long time, and what SEO involves has changed dramatically over the years. It is still one of the best ways to get more traffic to your site, and ultimately grow your business.

When most people think of SEO, the first thing that comes to mind is backlinks. While backlinks are still the driving force of the web, there are a lot of other factors the search engine bots take into consideration now as well. They are looking at engagement on your posts, dwell time on your site, page load time and many other factors.

Tony Messer wrote an article on Pickaweb last week where he explains and gives an exhaustive list of what it takes to get started with small business local seo:

Local Listings – How To Setup and Optimise

Before you do anything, you need to set up your main local listings. These are Google My Business, Bing Place for Business and Yahoo Local.

These are really important and you don’t need any special skills to do this. The only thing you need to do is to make sure you optimise your listing – filling all the details available, not just the basics like address and map. Include a full description using keywords that people are likely to search on.

Also add photos and videos – nothing flash, you just need to put in a little more effort than your competitors.

Start Getting Local Reviews

We recently did some analysis of top performing local websites and one of the key differences between the Best in Class and the Industry Average was the number of Google Reviews.

Check the local search results and you’ll see what I mean. The top sites get more reviews. It’s as simple as that.

And even simpler is getting reviews. You just need to ask and direct people to your Google listing. Even better is that you probably have loads of customers who would be happy to leave a 5 star review for you.

But don’t go crazy getting 100 reviews in a week – that looks unnatural and risks getting your site penalized by Google.

Steady as she goes is the way to think. Just get in the habit of getting reviews and if you add several each month then you will be absolutely fine.

Name, Address And Phone (NAP) Citations

There are loads of reputable local listing websites that you can list your website in. Google trusts these sites and getting listed is super easy.

They allow you to list your business with your Name, Address and Phone (hence NAP) details. The majority offer a free listing and there will usually be an enhanced, chargeable service. The main thing is to get listed and get a link back to your site.

As with reviews, nice and steady. Just pick up a few NAP Citations each month – 10 or 20 will be fine and you’ll see your rankings improve.

Read Tony’s Full Article “The Definitive Guide To Local SEO“

Tony gives a ton of great information in that article. We really love his infographic that he has on the page and highly suggest that if you are attempting SEO on  your own that you check it out and follow it! Everything he recommends in his post, we recommend, and implement for everyone of our customers as well. Mr. Messer, if you see this – well done on the article!

We must add that depending on your niche and location, a lot more may be required to get, and maintain good rankings in search results. If your business is located in a major city, or very competitive, there will be a lot more involved. In this case one of the best things you can do is really dive deep into your site as to how it functions and is structured. This can be very “geeky” and too technical for some business owners.

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Search Optimization With Schema

One of the components that we see gaining strength in search results is the use of Schema, or Structured Data. Aleyda Solis wrote an article on Search Engine Land that give a good explanation of why your company should be using Schema:

Structured data usage & optimization

Google SERPs haven’t been the traditional “10 blue links” for a long time, thanks to universal search results’ images, videos and local packs; however, the evolution took the next step with the launch and ongoing expansion of features like rich snippets, rich cards, knowledge panels and answer boxes. These features, according to SERP monitors like Mozcast and RankRanger, are now included in a non-trivial percentage of search results.

This shift means that attracting more clicks and visits through SEO efforts is now achieved not only through ranking well in organic listings but also by maximizing your site’s page visibility through these SERP features. In many cases, obtaining these display enhancements is a matter of correctly implementing structured data, as well as formatting and targeting your content to answer queries, where even modifiers can generate a change.

It has become critical to understand which of your popular and relevant queries can provide you more visibility through these various SERP features. By understanding which content has the opportunity to gain an enhanced display in SERPs, you can optimize that content accordingly with structured data and relevant formatting. You can identify these opportunities with search competition and keywords tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and the Moz Keyword Explorer.

Once you identify which of your content you should format and optimize with structured data, you can use Google’s search gallery examples as a reference to do it and verify its implementation with the Structured Data Testing tool (as well as the Google Search Console’s Structured Data and Rich Cards reports).

Continue Reading Aleyda’s Article “5 must-do technical SEO audit items in 2017“

She produced a great article with a lot of technical information that will make most people’s head spin that aren’t in the industry. However, she does give good reasons why your site should be using Schema. We would like to add that in our tests, adding Schema and structured data in the form of JSON-LD to your site can make a significant difference in how well your site ranks in search. This is because you are talking directly to the bot and telling it what your site is about without the bot having to try and figure out your site by the page content.

Summing It Up

SEO, rankings and getting visitors to your site has changed over the years, and continues to evolve. It is doable for some small business’ to take on their own search engine optimization, but will take a considerable amount of time from their daily schedule that could be spent instead focusing on daily operations. It will also involve a bit of a learning curve as well. Don’t let it scare you if you don’t have the budget to hire an outside firm. It is important to start creating a “foot print” on the web for your brand to compete in today’s online landscape.

As usual, if it’s too much for you to handle, or you don’t have the time, you can always contact us to handle your local seo at MDIMSolutions. You can also connect with our CEO on LinkedIn.

The following blog post Search Engine Optimization Tips For Small Businesses See more on: MD Internet Marketing Solutions Digital Marketing

2 Cost Effective Ways To Establish Or Improve Your Brand Reputation

Your company’s brand reputation is extremely important to it’s success. In our last article we covered what Brand Reputation is. Here is something to think about – the lack of having any comments or reviews about your services or products can be just as detrimental as having bad reviews. In this short article we will give you 2 easy ways to start building a good reputation for your brand online.

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Blogging

Probably the easiest way to start building or improving your Brand is with one of the most over looked marketing strategies by small business owners. If you have a website you should most definitely be utilizing the power of the blog, writing articles for your potential customers and prospects to read. You can be your own sounding bullhorn for your services and/or products.

Best part of blogging is that it’s almost free. The only thing it will cost you, or someone on your team, is time. (Nobody has enough time in the day!)

ReputationDefenderBlog.com recently wrote a post that covers a few more good reasons that you should be using blog content:

Here are 6 ways a blog can help your company:

• Be Your Customers’ Best Resource – Some people visiting your website know exactly what they want and are prepared to purchase right away. Others have questions. Maybe they already bought the product and want to know more about it. Maybe they have a future purchase in mind and want to educate themselves before they make a decision. If customers know they can find answers on your blog, it will keep them coming back to your site.
• Boost Rankings – More people visiting your site will generate more traffic and this will improve your rankings with Google and other search engines. Getting your website at the top of the search result page for your brand is the goal of any ORM campaign and blogging will help accomplish this.
• Increase Revenue – Every time someone clicks on your website is another chance to gain a new customer. New customers who keep coming back to read your blog are likely to turn into long term clients. This all adds up to a sustained increase in profits.

Continue reading “6 Ways A Blog Can Improve Your Company’s Reputation“

Good advice from them, especially their point of creating sharable content. It’s a great idea to take your content and share it across as many Social Media platforms that your company has. Don’t forget, Google isn’t the only place you can reach your target audience.

So how do you go about setting up a blog? If you are using WordPress as your CMS (Content Management System), it’s super easy. Right inside the admin panel you can ad posts. A lot of other CMS platforms have this feature as well.

But what if you have an HTML site or something else that it’s not so easy to make posts on? Our suggestion is go ahead and set up either a free or paid WordPress.com site, or a BlogSpot site that you can get free as well with Google. With either of these options you can link back to your main website inside the posts, or direct them where to go or whatever call to action you want.

Video

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Yup, video. If you have read any of our posts about video, you know how much we love video marketing. It’s our go to source for content marketing and engaging people not only on the web, but also on your site. (Ya, we know, there are no videos on our new updated site, but trust us – THEY ARE COMING!)

There are two great different ways of using video that we like, and have been using for awhile, to help in brand management. The first video you can make is what is known as an “Explainer” video, that does just that – explain your services or products. The second type of video we have been using is “testimonial videos”. These can be a little more difficult to produce, but if you have really good persuasive powers, you can talk a past client into being in a video for you.

SmartInsights.com actually wrote about this, and we weren’t surprised at all when they recommended these 2 methods in their post. Here’s a snippet from their article where they wrote about another type:

Company Story Videos

Telling your brand’s story will help you create a strong connection with your viewers.

Behind every great brand there’s a great story, and your prospects want to know it. They want to know and understand your values as a company, and showing this with video is the best way to do it.

The trick here is to be authentic. Your customers won’t believe staged scenarios, or conversations that look scripted; and it’s incredibly important that you don’t tell made-up stories! Because your customers will find out, and it will shatter your credibility.

So, authenticity is the key. Share that unique, inspiring story of your brand, and show your prospects that you and your team share their values.

Read The Full Article “Generating Brand Trust with Video Content“

We totally agree with the writer that you must be authentic when creating this type  of video. We would add that one of the biggest problems we see when companies create this type of video is over promoting, or bragging. If you start going on and on about how great your company is, or how many awards it has won is a problem. Most customers really don’t care about that and will quickly click off your video. What new customers want to know is how you have helped someone in the past, and how you can help them!

Summing It Up

There you have it. Whether or not there is nothing on the web about your Brand, or if you Brand is a little tarnished, you can start making it sparkle with these 2, relatively inexpensive ways to managing and promoting your Brand.

And as always, contact us at https://www.mdimsolutions.com/reputation-management for Brand Management services that your company needs

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2 Easy Ways To Help Improve Brand Reputation Find more on: MD Internet Marketing Solutions
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Is Your Company Utilizing Video To Market To The Masses?

Video is one of our favorite forms for bringing in new customers and keeping existing customers engaged. There are all kinds of crazy estimates about the percentages of which video will be the main platform of internet consumption by the year 2020. In this write up we will cover the reasons your company has to be using video NOW to keep up with demand and continue to grow your business.

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We have been firm believers in the power of video for years. 7 to be exact. While ranking factors and the process of getting videos ranked and viewed has changed, the fact that video consumption has not, and is continually growing.

Jordan Kasteler recently wrote a post on one of our favorite blogs – MarketingLand.com. We like what he made the title of the article – “It’s time for SMBs to go all in on social and mobile video”. We couldn’t agree more. In his article he writes:

Why video marketing is now a ‘must-do’

Sure, most of the marketing sphere is already well aware of the power associated with video content. Consumption and creation are at an all-time high, and according to an April Google-commissioned Nielsen study, YouTube reaches more adults 18+ during prime time than any cable network does.

But if Cisco’s projection that 82 percent of all consumer web traffic will be video-based by 2021 comes to fruition, it’s crystal-clear that the adoption of video has to be a matter of “when” and not “if” for SMBs.

We constantly hear the cry that the barrier of entry to video content is lower than ever for small businesses, which is indeed true. The wealth of video creation apps available continues to widen, while the popularity of live broadcasts, with their lower standards for production value, make it easier for scrappy SMB marketers to feel comfortable experimenting.

By now, we’re all familiar with the top channels available to both produce and distribute video. Through YouTube alone, there are plenty of opportunities for first-timers to test the waters, right? Then why are 39 percent of businesses still sleeping on video, despite visual content being heralded as the be-all, end-all of modern marketing?

Continue Reading His Article Here…

Jordan makes a lot of great points in his article. One of the most staggering statistics he gives is that on Mobile devices alone, YouTube reaches more Adults 18+ during prime time than any cable network does! That alone should be enough reason for some larger companies to stop putting so much money into TV ads and start making more use of online video.

We also agree with him that there is no reason that any company needs to be overly concerned or overwhelmed with just the though of making a video. It is extremely easy for any company to put out a quality video now. If your company is smaller and doesn’t have the budget to hire a professional video production company, there’s no reason you can’t do it yourself. There are plenty of online editing sites where you can edit your own video and make it look very professional.

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What Are The Components Of A Good Marketing Video?

Before you just “wing it” making your own video, you need to put in just a little thought first to make sure you are conveying the proper message and reaching or connecting with your target audience.

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen wrote an article last Thursday on OnlineVideo.net that gives some good tips about the fundamentals of selling with video:

1. Understand the video sales formula: Present a hook in the first 2 to 5 seconds, reveal the problem your product solves in the first 20 to 30 seconds, reveal the solution to the problem, introduce the solution for the first time, present solution benefits, and then offer credibility and a call-to-action—and use emotional triggers like shock or humor throughout the video. Conventional wisdom says you have 5 to 10 seconds to grab the audience’s attention, but Vest believes you have 1 or 2. He pointed to the Squatty Potty viral video that grabbed audience attention from the very first frame: a unicorn pooping rainbow ice cream.
2. The product or service must connect to the audience and seem useful: Be sure to provide viewers with a clear answer to the question “Why should I buy this product?” Also, give your customers a compelling, easy-to-navigate experience around the video in the landing page, the mobile version, and the purchasing process.
3. Broaden distribution and discoverability: Besides ads, how are people going to find your content? Are there fan pages for the product or company? Can you send your product to hundreds of influencers? Vest says VidPow typically contacts 100 publishers for each product it creates videos for, looking for as broad distribution as possible.

Continue Reading “7 Fundamentals to Help Brands Maximize Selling With Video“

He gives some great advice for businesses that want to jump into video. At the end of his article we like the fact he stated that if you are not ready to implement all 7 factors, just start with what you can and then basically fill in the blanks later!

Something else that we feel we should add is that you don’t have to try and make a video go viral from the start, referring to Eric’s first point of a video that went viral because of a unicorn pooping rainbow ice cream. To get started you can just make a video with pictures of your work with before and after shots if you have a service type business, or multiple pictures of your products, and then voice over with a description about how your services or products can help solve your customers problems. Do not drone on about how great you are or how many awards you have received.

Take Action!

We briefly covered why your business needs to be using video, as well as covered a few points about how to structure your video. So get to it, don’t let your competition get ahead of you by getting on the video band wagon before you!

If you would like to learn more about our video marketing services, please feel free to visit our site to find out more

Why Your Business Needs To Hop On The Video Marketing Band Wagon is republished from www.MDIMSolutions.com

The Different Types Of Internet Marketing

Digital marketing, online marketing, internet marketing. Ask 10 different people what it is and what it involves and you will get 10 varied answers. Still, it’s probably the most cost effective way with the best ROI for reaching the masses. There are multiple platforms for companies to reach their prospective audience across the web. In this short article we will cover a few of the most popular methods, along with our favorites.

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Which type of marketing is best for you will totally depend on your field of expertise and niche.

The main types, and our favorites that give our clients the best ROI include:

• PPC – Pay Per Click:
  These are the very first results that are available when performing a search. When searching in Google you will be able to identify these results because they have a green box with “Ad” in it before the URL of the website. PPC can also be done on other search engines as well as social media.
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization:
  This is where you or a digital marketing company works to get your website to the top of the organic searches. For instance, when performing a search for a service, the ads come first and then the “organic” or “natural” results. When searching in Google and Bing, this also includes the “Map Pack”. It’s important to note that the maps do not always appear and depend on the search query.
• SSM – Social Media Marketing:
  Yes you can not only advertise on most social media platforms with paid ads, but also posting information about your company and services. It’s everything from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat and many others and includes of course one of our favorites for our customers – YouTube.
• Content Marketing:
  This is a big one. By just having a blog on your website and producing quality content that is helpful and informational for your audience speaks volumes. This content can also be shared across your social media platforms to help keep up engagement. Then you can also combine content with SEO to get your posts found in the search engines to gain even more exposure.
• Email Marketing:
  This form has been around for quite some time. While it has become harder to “cold email” people because of spam defenders, we do find that this is a great way to market to your existing customers for upcoming sales or new products, etc.

These five are our favorites. But like we said in the beginning, there are a lot more opinions out there about the different types of internet marketing and what they involve. In fact some marketers actually consider Tv and radio to be forms of digital marketing.

Other Forms Of Marketing Online

There are a few other methods to get your marketing message across. Another somewhat popular form is Affiliate marketing. Susanna Gebauer wrote an article that gives a good description of affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based type of digital marketing. In contrast to PPC advertising with affiliate marketing, the advertiser does not pay for traffic but rather for conversions. The rates are usually higher but the risk on the side of the advertiser are limited since he only pays for conversions.

Affiliate marketing is popular with bloggers and high-traffic website owners who make money from selling other people’s products to their audience.

Continue Reading “10 Types Of Digital Marketing You Should Know – And Consider For Your Marketing Strategy“

We couldn’t have said it better. For most of our clientele, affiliate marketing really is viable. Susanna also backs up our point for email marketing and that it has to be for someone that is already on your list and not cold emails.  She also is a marketer that subscribes to Tv and Radio as methods of digital marketing.

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Another term and form that is gaining popularity is what is known as “Viral marketing”. It’s a bit more complex and requires a little more work, but can have excellent results and involves using video. Viral marketing is when your create a marketing campaign that is hilarious, about a “trending topic” or perhaps even weird, and then gets shared – and shared a lot! It usually causes a big spike in website traffic in a very short period of time.

Ivan Ivanov recently wrote on Business2Community about what makes up a viral campaign are current events, emotional uptick, the ‘WoW’-Factor, tackling a societal issue and using the correct social media platform.  He also goes on to ad:

When it comes down to the basics, every marketing campaign has the purpose of making an impression. This is especially true for viral stunts. The mistake marketing specialist often make is to think that to achieve viral success you need to go big or go home, but this is not always the case. Each successful viral marketing campaign shines in one of five categories. Some ads successfully tackle the latest current events, while others rely on the randomness of the ‘wow’ factor.

However, to dive deeper into the five pillars of viral marketing, we’ll take a look at some of the most recent viral marketing stunts that went completely astray. Without further adieu, here’s what you need to avoid when doing viral marketing stunts, as these five companies learned the hard way.

Finish Reading “What to Avoid When Doing Viral Marketing Stunts As These 5 Brands Learned The Hard Way“

That’s a good read. We especially like his advice about before launching your attempt at a viral campaign to look at other company’s failures and triumphs.  It is important to note that your attempts to make a marketing campaign go viral isn’t always possible.

Summing It All Up

So there you have 7 types of online marketing. If you dig around the web you will find more explanations and types, but for the best bang for your marketing dollars, the first 5 we listed are tried and true methods for all businesses.

To learn more about our internet marketing services, visit us @ MDIMSolutions.com

The post What Are The Types Of Online Marketing? was
originally seen on Ken Mandich’s MDIMS Blog

Brand Reputation

Your Brand reputation? Just what does this term mean and how does it apply to your business or company? That is exactly what we will cover in this short article.

What brand reputation really boils down to is how your company is perceived by customers or clients online, and offline. It’s also involves the emotions and ideas the customers associate with your brand. It revolves around everything your company does, again not only online, but offline as well. The main components that can have the biggest effect on your brand reputation involve public relations, promotions and advertising and customer service.

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This can be as simple as someone typing into Google search your company name + “reviews” and what shows up in Google My Business reviews and also reviews left on Yelp and YP.com. It can also involve what people are saying about your company on social networks and talking about your product or services.

With some careful thought and planning, you can actually use the theory of brand reputation as a great tool for marketing. If your product is used by millennials, then making your marketing campaigns stand out and geared towards them is a must. This would be done by making sure your site, product pages or service pages are mobile friendly and making use of the latest social media platforms. Then portray the image that your product or services are the coolest around, and everyone that is cool is using it.

How Is Your Business’ Brand Reputation?

There are some important things to remember when it comes to your brand reputation management. Not all of your marketing campaigns will be interpreted the way you intended, or you may have a problem with a product, or for whatever reason, things go wrong.

Amanda Marie wrote a great article on Business2Community.com about do’s and don’ts when it comes to your brand’s reputation:

Before Al Gore invented the Internet, there were fewer avenues of perception that brands had to pay heed to. It was simple, there was TV, newspaper, and radio.Through a combination of good service and well-intentioned, well-designed advertisements, brands could effectively shape their image to the one that promised them the most success. Now it’s TV, newspaper, radio, and a hundred online variations as well. In truth, there are thousands – but the average brand only needs to focus on those relevant to it’s customers and industry.

The playing field is larger, the competition is fiercer, and there are significantly more angles to consider. Brand reputation management, once a subset of a business’s marketing plan, is now the driving force behind it.

There are several key facets of online brand reputation management, each of them equally important.

Don’t Spam Search Results

If you create a large number of web profiles in an effort to overwhelm Google, you’re digging a hole for yourself. There are a lot of reputation management companies that offer to build a lot of social media profiles, press releases, and other garbage web content. It’s both cheap and ineffective. Google and Bing are smarter today, and they don’t fall for this technique anymore.

Do Work to Improve Your Search Ranking

The view from the top of the search engine rankings is pretty great. A study from online ad network Chitika found that the first organic listing on any given Google search page (that is, the first listing that is not a sponsored ad), receives 32.5% of the traffic. The second listing receives 17.6%, the third listing just 11.4%. “Position zero” search results, like Google’s “Featured Snippet” and “People Also Ask” boxes may garner even more attention.

Your brand reputation management strategy should put particular importance on getting your listing to the top of the search page, and making sure it stays there. That means providing varied, quality content, and doing the proper SEO legwork to make sure you stand out.

Continue Reading “Some Do’s and Don’ts for Brand Reputation Management“

Amanda wrote a really good article. However, there is one point that she makes that we don’t totally agree with. She says that you shouldn’t spam search results with social media profiles and press releases. We do agree that you shouldn’t just build a lot of profiles and abandon them.

We take the approach of building these properties and then pushing quality content to them. This can be extremely helpful when your company has received some bad publicity and push that bad content farther back in the searches. By building these other properties and maintaining them, you will also be able to leverage one of her other points of improving search ranking results.

How Do You Begin Working On Your Brand’s Reputation?

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Some companies let this first step overwhelm them. It’s really not that difficult for local businesses. Angely Grecia wrote a good article on MeltWater.com that gives some great advice on taking the first steps:

Online content adds a dimension to your brand – and ultimately your reputation – because the same brand can be perceived differently by online and offline audiences. The best way to manage brand reputation is to tell a cohesive story – to a receptive audience. While controlling the message in an age of social media is no longer an option, you can still steer the dialogue.

Here’s how:

1) Make a Good First Impression

What first impression do you want your brand to portray? … Time’s up. It takes less than 50 milliseconds to form a first impression. First impressions are so important because they give way to a ‘halo effect.’ Consider how visual design and the colors you use impact the way people feel about your website open the first view, that assessment is often transferred to its functionality.

2) Own and Embrace Who You Are

Your brand is derived from a mix of who you are (your executives and colleagues), who you want to be (your brand values), and who people perceive you to be (the user experience and branding). In a perfect world, your reputation follows the brand. Help this along by making your brand present across the customer touch points in the business: how employees answer phones, what employees and salespeople wear, what language they use when describing your services or products, e-mail signatures, social media presence and how they engage online, everything one can think of. The brand is every employee’s responsibility–not only the communications team’s. As a PR pro, you can ensure the whole company understands the corporate mission, vision, values, and goals so you can all believe, live, and breathe this.

Continue Reading “5 Steps to Brand Reputation Management“

Great article from Angely. We especially like that her first point about making a good first impression. That ties into what we were talking about earlier about how your brand reputation can be tied in, and to your marketing.

Summing It All Up

How your brand is perceived is extremely important to your companies survival. It can make the difference in spectacular sells, or your business going under. By managing your reviews in search, what is being said on social media, as well as “buzz” about your business, you can take your company to new heights.

To learn more, or take control of your company’s brand reputation and management, visit our site @ MDIMSolutions.com

What Is The Meaning Of Brand Reputation? is courtesy
of MD Internet Marketing Solutions
Blog

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Online reputation is becoming more important for businesses of all sizes that do and don’t have an online presence. Just because your company doesn’t have a website, which in this day and age is ludicrous, or doesn’t have a Facebook page, or Twitter account, doesn’t mean that these platforms aren’t important or relevant to your company.

Not only do you have to be concerned with what’s being said on social media, but also the countless directories online like Yelp, Manta, Kudzu, YP.com and a host of others.

The Affect Of Your Online Reputation On Your Business

So down to the nitty gritty – let’s first look at some statistics about online reviews and how they are perceived by the public.  In an article done by Kent Campbell on Reputatoinx.com blog, he shares some brutal statistics:

Eight Reputation Statistics That Affect How You’re Seen Online

91% of North American consumers read online reviews to learn about a business.

For better or for worse, most consumers are checking out Google Reviews, Yelp, and other customer feedback systems to get more information on businesses, says the most recent BrightLocal Consumer Review survey. Consumers often take into account what other people write about a brand, product, or service to determine if it’s a “good” business or not.

60% of consumers: Negative reviews turned them away

If reviews are overwhelmingly positive, the survey reports that 74% of consumers have greater trust in the organization. On the other hand, 60% of respondents said that negative reviews made them not want to use a business. Those with mostly 1- or 2-star reviews fail to convert 86% of prospective customers –– a major loss, especially for startups, who need the initial momentum to get going.

Recent reviews taken more seriously

The report also shows that consumers are getting better at sorting the real reviews from the fake, and they’re more likely to take a recent review seriously than an older one. Consumers will catch on when businesses hire people to write fake reviews, or resort to other automated, non-organic means of cultivating a positive reputation. Only authentic reviews will do.

Continue Reading Kent’s Full Article Here…

Good information from Kent that simply can’t be ignored. He also stated in his article that businesses with mostly 1 star and 2 star reviews fail to convert about 90% of new potential clients!

In Kent’s article,  that was mostly about what is happening with what can be found in Google search. But what about social media?

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Monitor Your Social Media Reputation

Usually with social media your reviews are in the form of comments. Now there are more platforms that you need to be concerned about. The two major sites that you must monitor are of course Facebook and Twitter. Fortunately, it’s easy to respond to these comments, but you must respond to these comments calmly, intelligently and most importantly – RESPECTFULLY. Get this wrong and it can cost your company thousands, if not millions in lost revenue!

Kissmetrics wrote an article with some great examples of “getting it wrong” or “reputation management failures” as they call it:

Here are three famous cases of reputation management failure in the digital era:

• Dark Horse Café received a tweet criticizing their lack of electrical outlets for laptops. Their response was something like: “We are in the coffee business, not the office business. We have plenty of outlets to do what we need.” Needless to say, this kind of defensive/aggressive behavior doesn’t work in the online world. Many blogs reported the fact as a negative public relations case.
• Nestlé received negative comments about their environmental practices a few years ago, and they did not address them. People started becoming aggressive and posted altered versions of the Nestlé logo, forcing the company to close their public page. Takeaway? Do not pretend people are not talking, and address criticism as soon as possible.
• Amy’s Baking Company fought fire with fire against a one-star internet review. Their insults against the reviewer eventually were picked up by the local news. It is obvious that negative attention is not good publicity.

What are people saying about you? Good online reputation management is not only about reacting well to what people say about you, your brand, or your products and services, but also about whether to react at all and, if so, when. Sometimes a reaction is not necessary, and sometimes a reaction that is too late can cost you millions.

A proactive approach to the matter consists of monitoring your public reputation on a regular basis, and not just when you come to know about a specific event to deal with. How do you do this? The magic tools invented to solve this problem fall under the name of “social media monitoring.”

Read The Full Article “The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management“

Great article for Kissmetrics. There is a lot of good information there. How you respond to unsatisfied customers and reviews for social media also needs to be applied to Google reviews and other review sites like Yelp as well.

Summing It All Up

Reputation management consists of just what it says, managing what customers are saying about your company online and giving a proper response, if required.

All to often it’s something that companies and businesses think about after it’s too late. Bad reviews and negative comments are on multiple platforms and sales are plummeting.

Our company prefers the avenue of “reputation marketing”, which is something we will get into in later posts. So stay tuned to our site for more on how you can protect your online presence.

If you would like a free consultation about your company’s online reputation, visit our site at https://www.mdimsolutions.com

What Is Reputation Management? was
originally published to MDIMS Digital Marketing Blog

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If you pay any attention at all to your surroundings in your daily life, it’s easy to see why you should be using digital marketing to reach new customers. When you are at the mall, walking down the street, or even at a restaurant, people are on some type of device. That alone should be reason enough. For you naysayers, we will give you more.

Top Reasons You Need To Be Using Digital Marketing

We started to write out a long description, but found this article by Eleana Stylianou that she wrote on CareerAddict.com that gives 10 reasons you should be using digital marketing:

1. More Cost Effective

It is more cost-effective than traditional marketing. This is especially important for small businesses as they don’t have many resources or a lot of capital. New media can provide you with a cheaper and more effective advertising channel.

2. Use Content to Connect with Customers

Using digital content either sponsored or free allows you to connect with consumers much more effectively than billboards, direct mail or PR campaigns. The strength of your online presence now directly linked to the success of your business.

3. Cater to the Mobile Consumer

Technology has evolved so much that mobile gadgets are no longer considered mere alternatives to personal computers or laptops. 91% of adults in the US alone always have their mobile devices within reaching distance and regularly use them to browse the internet. The largest group of consumers is using their mobile devices daily, so it’s essential that you use a marketing solution that targets these devices properly.

4. Realise Higher ROI and Revenue

By increasing your digital outreach, you can increase your revenue. The more data that you can extract from your outreach campaigns, the better your predictions and subsequently ROI will be.

5. Track Your Customer’s Journey

Using analytics services like Google analytics, you will be able to monitor all your customer’s actions, preferences and get a better insight into their behaviour. Analytics allow you to build the persona of your customer so that you can offer them the perfect experience.

Finish Reading Her Full Article Here…

It’s important to note her point 3. Everyone has a smart phone now! You need to finish reading her full article to find out more, especially points 9 and 10.

Measuring Your ROI

At the end of our last article – “What Is Digital Marketing And What Does It Consist Of?“, we briefly touched on the advantage of digital marketing for measuring your marketing dollars ROI. One of the best ways to check and monitor your ROI is by using Google Analytics.

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If you have never used the Analytics tool before, you may be a little overwhelmed at first, but after digging around for a little while, you will come to realize just how powerful this tool can be. This tool can give you a wealth of information.

We found a post on ValueWalk.com which gives a quick overview of what is available with this awesome tool and backs up our claim of how powerful it is, as well as pointing out other uses besides measuring ROI and traffic:

Learn the tricks to master Google Analytics

Google Analytics, a powerful tool for web analytics and a master key to a successful digital presence. It is extremely important for a website manager to know the type of visitor it receives, data on the type of resources they access and other relevant factors; in order to improve their website performance and to cater to a larger number of audience.

Most Google Analytics account holders have been observed to be looking at the top layer of this powerful tool, and this includes looking at numbers which signify the number of views and visitors, but there is much more to this free yet amazing analytics tool. Features that can provide you an insight of visitors, they activities and demands; and thus enabling the webmaster to enhance their website experience. Here are a few handy tips and tricks that would allow you to get the most out of Google Analytics tools.

Read the full article here…

Two key take aways from the article is the ability to measure site speed as well as mobile device reports.

However there are some things that you need to do to be able to use this tool to it’s maximum potential. As part of our internet marketing series of posts, we will cover this more indepth in upcoming articles. So be sure check back to learn more about Digital Marketing @ MDIMSolutions.com

Why Your Company Should Use Digital Marketing was
first seen on MD Internet Marketing Solutions SEO Service

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Digital Marketing, or sometimes also referred to as Online Marketing – unless you don’t have a computer, tablet, smart phone or an Internet connection, you have been exposed to it in one form or another. It has become the best way for businesses of all sizes get and maintain Brand awareness as well as bring in new customers. It’s the fastest growing and evolving form of marketing on the planet.

Why has digital marketing been expanding at a phenomenal rate? That’s because other forms of marketing to the public have really lost their value and effectiveness in recent years. TV ads have become increasingly expensive and out of reach for most business owners. Regular radio has lost potential listeners to commercial free satellite radio and other platforms like Pandora. Even roadside billboards have lost their effectiveness because most passengers in a vehicle are on their smartphone checking out Facebook.

So exactly what is Digital, or Online Marketing?

Basically, it’s an umbrella term used for several methods of reaching your audience or clients across the web. A few of the main platforms to reach your company’s audience or clientele include:

• Your Website
• SEM, or Paid Ads
• Video Marketing
• Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.)

There is a lot more to marketing online, but these are the basics. Now we will cover how you can reach your audience or new customers with these platforms.

Your Website: In our opinion, and many other professional online marketers, this is the most important part of the equation. Almost all of your ads, social media outreach, emails and everything will send customers back to here to learn more about your services and products. Your website also gives the first impression of your Brand.

One of the biggest assets to your website is to have a  blog. You can write content for your audience (like this post). Your viewers can learn more about your company, your services or your products.

Then Local SEO comes into play. You can get your website to rank high in the search results for terms that people using the internet use to find your company’s services. This can also be applied to your blog posts as well.

SEM (Ads): Ads are everywhere! You’ve seen them on Facebook, Twitter and every social media platform, as well as your favorite browser when you search for something on the Internet, like a service or product. It’s still a good way to expand your business and your Brand. There is some debate as to if they are still viable as most people skip the ads and get to the content they are after.We feel that it’s still a great method and should be combined with SEO.

Video: This is a medium that is growing very rapidly! There are all kinds of estimates on different blogs as well as research that claim crazy numbers like 80% of all internet traffic will be through video by the year 2020. While we don’t think it’s will be that crazy, by looking at the past history of video, it will definitely take it’s lion share of marketing!

Video is extremely engaging. People have short attention spans and would rather watch the internet than read it. You can quickly inform the viewer of who you are, your service, and why they should choose you over the competition.

Social Media: This platform is growing by leaps and bounds daily as well. It seems like there is a new platform every month. However, the tried and true giants are Facebook and Twitter. Others that are really paying off with an excellent ROI are Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Depending on what type of business you have and your projected audience will depend on which social network will work best for your company.

This is in no way an exhaustive list of all the different types of digital marketing. It is, however, our favorites and work the best for every business type that we serve and help grow.

There Are Almost As Many Different Explanations Of What Digital Marketing Is As There Are Digital Marketers!

To give you a great example, Lee Odden from the Top Rank Marketing Blog wrote an excellent article where he asked 9 Digital Marketers what it meant:

Have you noticed the phrase “digital marketing” being bounced around a lot more lately? Me too.

I admit that I’m one of the sources of that bouncing. With the rate of change occurring in the marketing world, I think describing what we do is something that isn’t really satisfied by just one phrase. Content, Search, Inbound, Multi-Channel, Integrated, all seem to have their place, but “Digital” seems to express what most companies are creating in their marketing right now.
What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a term used to describe the integrated marketing services used to attract, engage and convert customers online. Digital marketing utilizes multiple channels such as content marketing, influencer marketing, SEO, social media and online advertising to help brands connect with customers and uncover performance of marketing programs in real-time.

As much as people toss around “digital marketing”, I get the impression that we’re not all on the same page in terms of what it actually means. Just a few weeks ago, we posted a digital marketing predictions post that now has nearly 8,000 social shares. Both the answers and the feedback were quite varied.

Read The Full Article And What They Answered Here…

 

If you read that article and saw all the different answers, you know what we mean!

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But here is the kicker – with all of these types of online marketing, it is very easy to track what types are performing and giving your company a satisfactory ROI. This is explained in a fantastic, lengthy article written by Mike Tomita in his article  “Measure the ROI of Digital Advertising Beyond Revenue Impact”:

Return on investment (ROI) is an important part of digital marketing (and really, almost every part of marketing)—it tells you whether you’re getting your money’s worth from your marketing campaigns. And if you’re not, it’s critical to get to the bottom of it, and understand why so you can learn how to improve your campaigns. But first, you need to understand how you can effectively measure the ROI of digital advertising.

The most instinctive way to measure digital advertising ROI is to track metrics that tie directly to revenue and profit (think conversions, opportunities, etc.). While it sounds great on paper, in the real world, this oversimplified view can paint an inaccurate picture of your ROI, especially if your product is sold at a low price per unit. Big picture measurement often factors in soft metrics—things like brand impressions, impressions, website visitors, and downloads—which help tell a more complete story.

Read The Entire Article Here…

You need to take the time to read that full article if you are interest in some of the best ways to measure you digital marketing ROI.

So there you have the basics of online marketing. If you want to learn more about Digital Marketing, stay tuned to our website!

What Is Digital Marketing And What Does It Consist Of? is available on MD Internet Marketing Solutions SEO Service

So what is branding? Some old school people may think of branding and applying to cows and cowboys   A hot iron of the fire and burning an emblem on your steer to identify them from other ranchers cattle. Branding for your company is somewhat similar, only you won’t be taking a hot iron and burning emblems on your computer or other places.

Branding is a must no matter how large or small your business is.

Creating Your Brand

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The first thing in creating a brand for your company is your logo. In my opinion, your logo is probably the most important starting point for creating your brand. When you see logo’s like the 2 red circles or bullseye for Target, or an apple with a bite out of it for Apple, you know right away who you are dealing with.

At Entrepreneur.com, they wrote a great article about things to take into account for creating your logo:

Ideally, your company logo enhances potential customers and partners’ crucial first impression of your business. A good logo can build loyalty between your business and your customers, establish a brand identity, and provide the professional look of an established enterprise.

Consider Allstate’s “good hands” logo. It immediately generates a warm feeling for the company, symbolizing care and trust. With a little thought and creativity, your logo can quickly and graphically express many positive attributes of your business, too. Continue reading “How To Create A Logo“

Really good article that goes on to explain more about how to create your logo including logo types and what colors to use and to avoid.

One piece of advice that they recommend, as do we, is that if your aren’t very artistic go ahead and higher a graphic designer. Once you start using your logo to establish your brand the last thing you want to do is change it.

Creating Emotion To Go With Your Brand

Also notice how in Entrepreneurs article they state how Allstate’s logo creates a warm feeling. This is another major part of your branding. The emotion of your brand. You can create your brand to be warm and inviting like Allstates, or fun and simple like Apple’s.

One other thing to take into consideration is the size of your audience and who your audience is. You will notice in our branding that we have a logo, but on a lot of our different profiles I use a nice profile picture. The reason for this is because we don’t ever intend to get as big as a McDonalds or Nike. If your company is smaller and just in one general location this may be a better option for you. The reason being is people in general prefer connecting with a person over a company.

Branding Your Website

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This should seem like a no brainer, but you would be surprised at how many companies don’t ad their logo in a prominent space on their website and everywhere on their site. You want your logo on every page and post of your site.

As I explained above, I also use a nice profile picture as well. It’s always the same profile picture. This profile picture is also on our homepage and every page of our site, with posts the exception. You could probably ad your profile picture to your posts if you wanted to, as many authors do. I’m just sure people get enough of seeing my ugly mug:)

Beyond Your Site To Social Media

Now put your logo all across the web everywhere you can. Your Yelp listing, YP page, Kudzu and every other place you put a citation or listing for your business. (More on what citations are and how to build them here)

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Then of course ALL of your social media pages. A few of the top social platforms we like and use are Google+, Company FaceBook page, Twitter and Tumblr. This actually helps 2 fold.

1. It helps reinforce your brand with your consumers and makes you recognizable across all the web.
2. Search Engines love this type of branding. It REALLY helps with your SEO. (Learn more about how social media can help your SEO here)

When it comes to branding for SEO, just look at big companies like Home Depot and Walmart. It’s a fact that Google loves branding. By building a large brand you are telling the search engines that you are a legitimate business by being everywhere on the web with multiple sites.

Add Your Brand Logo Everywhere You Can

There are a few other great places that you can ad your logo.

The first place that a lot of people neglect is their Email signature. Everyone of your professional correspondences should have your logo on it in the signature line, as should everyone that works in your company.

Next, packaging. If your company delivers a physical product with packaging, put your logo there as well.

Lastly, your business cards. In addition to your logo being on your card, also consider using your branded profile picture as well. This is a great trick to get people to remember who you are. Months later they may look at your business card and wonder who you are. If you have a profile picture on your card, it’s makes it a lot easier to remember.

Summing It All Up

To get started building your brand, start with a great logo. Then create the feeling and emotion that you want to go with your brand which can be tied in with your logo. Then put your logo everywhere you can possibly think of to reinforce your brand to your audience. Then by using branding as part of your SEO strategy, you will help your website with better rankings in the search engines.

Images are important to include in your blog posts, for a few reasons. They are great for helping to break up your content as well as help “tell the story” that you are trying to convey. Good pictures also help with social engagement and shares. A couple of things that bloggers neglect to do is optimize them for SEO and speed. With this short post we will cover why you should be using images if you aren’t, as well as optimizing them for SEO.

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Using Images For The Reader

Everyone knows the old saying – “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Images are easier to process and visitors to your site will be drawn to them. Articles with great images are also more likely to get shared more across social media platforms. When is the last time you went to a blog posts that was long or all text and just read it?

Images help break up your content and should be visually appealing. It is important however to remember to use the right image to help tell your story or convey your message. Your image should be relevant to the article and should be somehow related.

Posting a picture of some beautiful woods scene when your article is about exercising doesn’t relate. A picture of someone actually exercising or wiping sweat from the forehead after exercising would be a much better choice.

James Balm wrote an article on BioMedCentral a while ago on the science behind the power of images and why you should use them in your blog posts:

Why do we love images so much?

We are very visual creatures. A large percentage of the human brain dedicates itself to visual processing. Our love of images lies with our cognition and ability to pay attention. Images are able to grab our attention easily, we are immediately drawn to them. Think about this blog, for example: did you look at the words first, or the image?

We process images at an alarming speed. When we see a picture, we analyse it within a very short snippet of time, knowing the meaning and scenario within it immediately. The human brain is able to recognise a familiar object within 100 milliseconds. People tend to recognise familiar faces within 380 milliseconds, which is pretty speedy. Read The Full Article “The power of pictures. How we can use images to promote and communicate science” Here.

Great article from James. Later in the article we really like where he talks about how images help with learning. He talks about how infographics really help with this. Yes, inforgraphics are considered images and are great for helping people skim your content. Read the full article to learn more about why you should be using images in your posts.

Images And SEO

So we covered why you should be using pictures. So how can they help with SEO?

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The first thing is naming your images. We actually like naming our images BEFORE we upload them to our website to make it easier. Using one of your keywords that you are trying to target is good to use as part of the image name. Just don’t over do it by keyword stuffing.

Rizvan Ullah, someone we have quoted before, wrote an article on Johnchow.com that explains optimizing your photos or images very well:

Now that the images have been uploaded, it’s important they are named correctly before adding them to your content. It’s important to be strategic when naming them because Google does have an “image search” option, which can generate enormous traffic to your website. Through “image search”, in Google, users can visit the page of the hosting website, which will lead them directly to your content. Here are the things you should do when naming your images…

First, makes sure you rename them using your “targeted” keywords. Next, make use of the meta-data fields that easily allow you to optimize your images. For example,

• Alt tag – The text within the “ALT” field will be displayed to users if your image cannot be loaded or if it’s taking too long to load.
• Title tag – Here is where you can add additional text to display to your users when they hover over. Great place to add keywords and relevant information about the image perfect for search engines.

Read Rizvan’s full article here…

Great article from Rizvan, with another great point that he makes earlier in the article, and the it’s important to compress your images as well.

Images Without Compression Can Hurt Your SEO

Image compression is a BIG part of the SEO equation as well. Why? If your images aren’t compressed they will make your website load slower. A slow loading site is not only a turn off for visitors, but the search engines as well. Site load speed is a ranking factor.

Compressing your images is fairly easy if you are using a WordPress site as there are a multitude of plugins that will compress the images. Earlier on in Rizvan’s article he lists 3 plugins and one of them is one that we use, EWWW Image Optimizer. If you don’t like any of his recommendations, there are a LOT more

Summing It All Up

If you aren’t using images in your posts – start. Our brains are wired for images. Make them relevant to your topic and also use infographics where possible. Images also help get your content shared more on social media. And by taking the time to find some great images you can help boost your website search engine ranking as well!

So you just spent some time or money on creating a new company video. So what do you do with it now? Just let it sit on your desktop and collect digital dust? Just leave it on whatever platform you chose to upload it to and HOPE someone views it and takes action? In this short article we will cover a few things you can do with your new business videos to help increase visits to your site and increase sales.

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Your Website

First, let’s consider what your video is about. Did you create a video that explains your business and who you are? If so, then a great starting point for the video is on your website. Studies show that websites with a video on the homepage rank higher in the searches.

Your homepage is also a great place if your video is about your company and who you are. This type of video will actually help the viewer trust you more over your competition that doesn’t have a video on their site.

If your video is about your services, product overview or product demonstration, consider making a separate page on your website to showcase all of your videos.

Using my favorite example, a plumber, ideally you would have separate pages for hot water heater replacement, new construction, and so on. It would be great to have a separate video for hot water heater replacement and have that at the top of your page for hot water heater replacement. A video that demonstrates how careful your company is and your guarantees will always convert higher than your competition that doesn’t have a video on their page.

Optimize For Google

If you have followed any of our previous posts or checked out our site, you should know by now that YouTube is our favorite platform for our marketing videos. Why? Well, YouTube now reaches more 18-49 year olds than any cable network. AND, with proper optimization of your channel and your video, your video can rank in Google search. Read our previous post “YouTube SEO“

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This is a great place to start with any video that explains your services, or a video that is meant to drive sales. It may be a little more difficult to get the video to rank for some niches than others, but well worth the effort.

If you made a video that has customer testimonials, then this is another must. You need to get the video ranked for “Your Business Reviews”. People are constantly searching business reviews. Again, studies show that people are much more likely to click on a video thumbnail over text. This is also a GREAT way to help with your online reputation management as you can help push bad reviews back a page by having multiple customer testimonial review videos on the first page.

With YouTube as your platform, you can also connect your website to your channel. This allows you to have clickable annotations directly inside your video so that the viewer can click through to your site, from inside the video! These annotations work on almost platforms that the video is shared on without stripping out the clickable annotations.

There are also what is called “cards”. These cards work pretty much the same way as annotations, except that they also work on most mobile devices with the exception being mostly Apple devices.

Social Media

Of course social media! Post that video everywhere you can! It’s almost like social media was created for video and vice versa. Your company Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn and every other platform you have. Depending on the type of company video you made will depend on the results that you get from social media.

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If your video is about your company, then posting this video across social media helps with your branding. This works well, even with “boring” type niches. Check out this snippet from Cameron Uganec over at HootSuite:

Employer branding is another common use of social video. This allows you to show a more fun or hidden side of your company, regardless of how ‘boring’ it might seem from the outside. Even accounting firms (sorry accounting firms!) can have great company culture. Social video, whether live or on demand, is a great way to lift the veil on your business and attract new applicants. Read The Full Article Here…

That’s a great post from Cameron, and I suggest you read the full article that gives even more reasons and ways to use your videos.

Videos that show the inner workings of your business and show the human side of your business are GREAT for social media. People don’t like connecting with businesses, they like connecting with other human beings   Also remember to ASK for shares and likes of your video to help get it out to more potential customers.

Summing It All Up

Optimize that video! Get it ranked in the searches. If it’s a video about your business and who you are, get it ranked for your company name. If it’s about your services, name it your service, i.e. “hot water replacement Marietta” and get it ranked for that. Testimonials – “Your Business Reviews”. And lastly, don’t forget about the all mighty social media card and ASK for shares. Until next time

Blogging. Some people love to write, others hate it. But the question we want to address here is will blogging on a regular basis really help drive traffic to your website? The short answer is Yes. But, you have to do it properly, otherwise you are just putting up content without helping drive visitors to your site. This will more than likely be the first in a series about blogging.

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The first thing to make sure that your posts drive traffic is to know how to create engaging content to get people to read and ultimately share your content.

Catchy And Curious Post Titles

The first part of your blog post, and probably the most important is the title. Writing engaging titles that sparks interest with your audience is a must.

One of our favorite tactics for this is making our title a question, such as the title for this post. In our opinion it really helps spark the interest of potential readers, especially to people that are really seeking the information that your blog post is about.

Rizvan Ullah wrote a post on JohnChow.com that can give you some more great ideas as far as how to write great titles to increase click throughs, including another favorite of ours and we should use more often, using numbers:

5 Ways to Write Effective Headlines That Double Your Traffic

Use Numbers

Numbers within your headline are a great way to play the psychological game with your reader. People have been programmed to accept headlines more effectively and it draws people to click through to your content. It works because it indirectly tells people your content isn’t “1” long piece of text and they’ll be able to engage with it better. As a matter of fact, this is the reason numbered lists tend to perform so well with readers and in search engines because it a shorter form of content that can still be of high value. Read The Full Article Here…

Great post from Rizvan. He also covers more about how he uses questions to drive user engagement as well as using superlatives and being to the point. If you are having problems coming up with engaging titles, read the full article.

When it comes to writing the article itself we really like Rizvan’s point of being to the point. With some business types or niches, it’s even possible to help tell a story. I don’t want to get to in depth about how to write, as this post is more about will blogging get you more traffic and how.

Social Media Shares

One of the most important reasons that we want a catchy title is for our next point, sharing and getting your content shared on social media. A lot of local search engine optimization companies skip or don’t even address the importance of using social media.

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Using social media is part of our core SEO strategies. After all, our objective is to drive more traffic to your site and get more sales. You really don’t care where the traffic or sales come from, as long as they come.

So once you have crafted and posted your new article, go ahead and share it on your social media profiles, especially your business profiles (which you should definitely have!). And here is the kicker, ASK people to retweet, share and like your content. Studies show that asking people politely such as “please retweet” or “please like and share” can practically double the amounts of retweets and shares a piece of content gets. We don’t think the search engines put a lot of weight on likes but they do on shares, so the more shares the better. For more on likes vs shares, check out this post – “Will Social Media Help With Your SEO?“

So to sum it up with social media, the more shares, the more eyes that will be on your content driving more traffic to your site.

Okay, so we have a good post that is being shared across social media and your site is getting more traffic. However, there are some things that you MUST avoid to keep people from bouncing off or clicking the back button and leaving your site.

Avoid Making These Mistakes!

One of my biggest pet peeves is pop ups. Everyone has seen them. You are looking for some information, a headline gets your attention, you visit the site, and right away you are bombarded with a pop up trying to get you to sign up or buy something. Then sometimes there are multiple pop ups, one right after the other. Sometimes you can’t even find the “X” to click out of the darn thing. In those cases, I always hit the back button.

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Another turn off and sure way to get someone to leave your site in a hurry is to many ads. Over at ProBlogger, they recently made a post that gives you some excellent tips of things to avoid on your blog that talks more about advertisements:

9 Reasons I Hate Your Blog

Advertisements everywhere

Advertisements make for a spammy, ugly blog. Some bloggers put ads everywhere you can imagine. They might place an ad between paragraphs, inside popups, in the header, on sidebars, or even sugarcoat an ad as “other relevant resources” at the bottom of a post.

The truth is that, yes, there is tons of money to be made with these kinds of strategies.

Scott DeLong, founder of ViralNova, sold his site for $100 million. His site was similar to BuzzFeed and was chock full of advertising. His success (though big part of it depends on how he grew his site traffic, not jamming ads to his site) has sparked ambitious bloggers to build a similar site/blog and maximize the number of ads they can squeeze onto one page. Continue Reading “9 Reasons I Hate Your Blog“.

Be sure and read that full article as it really has some great tips as to what to avoid with your blog to help keep people on page and not click the back button.

It’s funny that earlier in that article another thing that makes them “hate” a blog is pop ups. I’ll give you one more tip with pop ups, because we know that they do work. In my honest opinion, the best place to have them is when someone is getting ready to leave your page. That way they have had the opportunity to absorb your content, and if you did a good job, maybe they will subscribe, or do whatever it is that you want them to.

Final Thoughts

In my honest opinion, if you craft your post correctly with good titles, Yes, they will help generate traffic to your site by getting more clicks in the organic searches as well as getting shared more across the social media networks. More clicks + more shares = MORE TRAFFIC AND MORE SALES!

Looks like Google is changing things up once again. Imagine our surprise at that! Google is always mixing things up, sometimes for the better, and other times for the worse. This time Google is changing the local 3 pack to a 2 pack with a twist.

It hasn’t been that long since Google changed from the 7 pack to what is now the 3 pack. If you don’t know what we are talking about, it’s when you search for a business service and something like this pops up in the search:

That was a search for Marietta plumber and what was returned.

Now Google is going to change this to a 2 pack, with a really big twist. It will still be a 3 pack, although now the top spot will be an ad! So in the example above, the listing of Roto-Rooter would be an ad.

How much will it cost? Well that remains to be seen. We can bet that it will cost a pretty penny since the snack pack generates so many leads.

How will this impact Google and the user performing the search? Well obviously it will be great for Google as they will make more money from local businesses trying to bring in more customers. For the user on the other hand, probably not so good. There is a good chance that a business that isn’t that reputable could potentially end up in the 3 pack.

Can you blame Google? After all, they are a business and make a lot of money from ads. We would have preferred to see them leave the pack at 7, then take one away for ads, but we don’t have any control over what they do.

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How Do You Get Into Google’s Snack Pack?

So how can you combat this? If you still want to be in the 3 pack, one of the best ways to get there and stay there is by getting a lot of  citations with the correct name, address and phone number of your business listed everywhere.

These citations are places like YellowPages.com, Kudzu, Manta and Yelp to name a few. The more of these citations you have, the better your chances of being listed in the 3 pack. However, it is extremely important to make sure that your business information is listed EXACTLY the same way across all platforms. For instance, if your address is 1234 Main Street, and that was how you listed it in Google, you would want to make sure that you listed your address that same way across all platforms and not abbreviate Street for St.

There is some debate, as usual, if getting more good reviews will help get you into the 3 pack. We tend to lean towards no on that, since you can do a search for a business service and businesses with less reviews than others will rank higher in the pack.

Try Google’s Featured Snippets

There is another way to get top listings however. And this is something that has been around for a very short time and SEO’s debate whether or not it is beneficial to creating leads or not. It’s Google’s Featured Snippets.

Here is what Google has to say about this feature:

“When a user asks a question in Google Search, we might show a summary of the answer in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL.”

Here is an example when we searched how to unclog a drain:

Notice that it comes before any of the listings? Pretty cool. Take notice also that there is a link in the snippet to the website where the information was taken from.

Will you be able to rank a featured snippet for something like “Atlanta Plumber” or “Roswell Electrician”? Probably not. However, if you can do some serious keyword research you can increase your chances for these snippets popping up in different places.

Ryan Clutter wrote an article in Search Engine Journal that explains the best ways to increase your chances of getting featured in these snippets:

7 Ways to Improve Your Chances for Featured Snippets

According to research conducted by HubSpot, websites that rank in the first five positions are highly favored to appear in the answer box, though you don’t have to rank in organic position number one. Use SEMRush to determine how well your keywords are ranking. For those in the first five positions, make alterations to help boost your chances of earning your presence in the answer box.

Anticipate a long-tailed query in question form to improve featured snippets.

What answers are your customers seeking? Show your readers and Google that you’re able to accurately answer their question.

Keep in mind there is no exact science to gaining featured snippets—and no 100% chance you’ll ever see your content in these boxes.

Read The Full Article Here…

Ryan makes a lot of great suggestions in the article. One suggestion that he makes that we really like later in the article is making your long tail keyword search query (what your intended audience is searching for) your H2 tag. That’s super slick! If you are performing your own SEO, you need to read the entire article so you can be equipped better for featured snippets.

In Conclusion

So if you are bent on staying in the 3 pack, more citations to keep you there. We would highly suggest that you also take into consideration on making posts on your site that can possibly get you into the featured snippets. After all, it can help increase the chances of driving more traffic to your site, which is what we are after anyhow.

Be sure and contact us if you are in need of an online marketing company to help handle all of your SEO needs

Social media is becoming a huge force in driving traffic to websites and creating more sales for all types of local businesses. If you aren’t using social media as part of your company SEO strategy, you are not getting the most out of what is possible with digital marketing. However, in this post we will focus mostly on one giant social platform in particular, Twitter.

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If you doubt how powerful social media can be in driving traffic and it’s benefits, check out our previous post “Will Social Media Help With Your SEO?“. Now days when you watch TV and you see commercials for big brands (if you aren’t using a DVR and fast forwarding through the commercials like I do) at the end of a lot of these commercials you will see that you can follow them on social media. If it were a waste of time do you think these mega companies would be hiring staff to post to these different social platforms?

Just in case you are still on the fence about using social media, here is a post from Geektime.com that was written by Nadav Olmert and what he says about using social media:

Use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Medium, and Tumblr to start forums specific to your niche. With over 1.5 billion people using social media, there is a large amount of potential traffic that you can direct to your website. People will ask questions and start discussions about areas that are relevant to you. It’s important to support this by providing links back to your website and publishing information that your audience will find interesting.

Being active on social media also means finding other threads that apply to your area and following them. Another good idea would be to go through your old posts and make sure that they are all tagged with hashtags and the right meta tags that will link back to your blog.

Also, target competitors’ fan pages, interests, and likes: You can find out what motivates your competitors’ audience to like their page, you can see what their fans like and dislike about their content, and even how to respond to negative feedback by watching how your competitors respond. Customers who interact with companies through social media convert 25-45% more than others. This shows how much potential there is on social media, and by “stalking” your competitors, you can optimize this potential. Continue Reading “7 key ways to get quality traffic to your website“

Notice the second platform that he mentions is Twitter?! And check out those stats about how many more customers interact with companies through social media and their conversion rates. Even if you look at the low number, 25%, how much more revenue would that mean for your business if you had an influx of 25% more sales?

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Twitter For Newbies

On to the importance of Twitter. If you have never used Twitter before or know what it is, basically you create what is known as tweets. These tweets have a character limit of 140 characters. That’s not a lot to work with, but carefully crafted tweets can still get your message across.

In case you have never used Twitter before, here is a good video that explains for newbies –

There is a lot of good information in that video for newbies, and highly suggest you watch the entire video if you are new to the platform.

Twitter has now also changed their character limit as not to include image links and tags to count toward it’s 140 character limit in tweets. For more on this change here is a snippet from LuxuryDaily.com with some helpful info as to how to structure your tweets:

With Twitter’s update allowing users to include more media and text in their posts, it is important that brands find a positive balance between over posting and contextual, relevant experiences. The expansion only counts for images currently, meaning links will still matter towards the character count, signifying there will be a jump in brands leveraging Twitter Cards to bring in traffic.
“Even with the changes, it is still important to ensure your tweets are informative, timely, useful and engaging,” said Carrie McIlveen, US director of marketing at Metia. “Also the use of hashtags and URLs will still be included in the 140-character limit.
“Brands will want to consider using Twitter Cards for URLs to provide additional character usage,” she said. “Also when tweeting, it is still important to not overuse or abuse hashtags in your message.
“You want to continue to consider positioning and relevance when using hashtags.” Continue Reading “What Twitter’s character count expansion means for marketers“

Notice that links are still counted towards your 140 character limit. If you have a long URL for your website it can take up a lot of characters, so consider using a URL shortner such as Goo.gl  to help save on character usage. It’s a great “trick”, and don’t know why more people don’t use it. However you want to make sure that the URL shortner that you use is a true 301 redirect as not to loose “link juice” coming from twitter. More on 301 and 302 and other types of redirects in another post to come

Now you may have heard of a study that was just completed that reports 59% of content shared on twitter will never get clicked. Now you may be thinking, “then why bother?”. Well wait a second, sure 59% is a big number, but 41% is still a good number to be working with.

Danny Goodwin covered this study on SearchEngineJournal.com:

Their study looked at a month’s worth of visits to five popular news sites (BBC, Huffington Post, CNN, New York Times, and Fox News). The researchers discovered that 2.8 million shares on Twitter drove 9.6 million visits to 59,000 pages – and a poor correlation between social shares and views.

Essentially this means that having a large number of Twitter shares doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get tons of traffic. No surprise there – a lot of people share links without ever clicking.

Certain types of content, which the researchers called blockbuster content, generated 90 percent of clicks. This isn’t surprising, either. Certain pieces of content you publish will outperform all your others in terms of traffic – and those posts tend to get a lot of shares.

Another interesting finding is that posts that go viral usually aren’t shared by the publication, but by readers. Continue reading “59% Of Content Shared On Twitter Will Never Be Clicked“

Notice that the study was based on top news sites. In our opinion that really isn’t fair to assume that the same case can be made for ALL types of content and businesses shared on Twitter. With this information however, it is important to make sure that your tweets are informative and relative to get the most traffic to your site from them.

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Twitter And SEO

On to our final point. Your twitter profile can be built up with Page authority to help boost your website. How? When you follow other people in your industry, create your own tweets and retweet other peoples content on your profile, as well as gaining more followers. Over time this will build the page authority of your profile.

Now when you create a tweet and give a link back to your site, this link is now more powerful and carries more weight with the search engines. In addition, when your tweet gets retweeted, WALLAH! More backlinks.

Now your SEO company may say, or you may have read that social media backlinks don’t count. Well we say “B.S.” And so do a lot of other SEO’s. Check out a little snippet from an article done by Eric Seal at Business2Community.com:

So yes—it’s likely that Google does rank social signals, but not directly. It’s far more likely that they look at backlinks posted on social, such as those embedded in tweets. Any credible backlinks would be marked by Google and then factored in when calculating a page’s rank. Read The Full Article Here…

Check that out – “such as those emedded in tweets”. Hate to say it, but – Told you so!

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. Twitter can drive direct traffic to your site leading to more sales or calls. Just how much, well the jury is still out on that one. Even if only 25% of your tweets get shared and clicked, we still think it’s a decent number worth going after. And if no one ever clicks on your links, but retweets your tweet – then you are getting more backlinks, and we know that backlinks are still a major ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Until next time

Long gone are the days of the “wild west” on the internet. In the old days you use to be able to just throw up any old piece of content that was keyword stuffed and didn’t have good or relevant information for the person performing the search.

As the search engines become smarter and actually learn, your website, or whatever property you are trying to rank in the searches, must be all about quality. Your site must provide good quality and informative information for the person performing the search as well as fresh information for the search engines.

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When it comes to quality, there are two things that you must always pay attention to for your site. You need to have quality content on your site and quality backlinks pointing to your site. Backlinks AND content in the form of regular posts are a key factor in search engine rankings.

Quality Content

First, lets look at quality content. When it comes to posts that you write they need to be informative as well as trying to stay on topic as much as possible. To find good quality content for your site you can post what’s new in your industry. You can also post about new things inside your own company.

In some industries it may be hard to come up with new content to publish frequently enough, which brings us to “content curation”, or basically copying and pasting part of another blog’s material in your post.

It’s okay to go ahead and copy a part or small section of someone else’s content and add it to your post as long as it makes sense and adds value to your content. We will go more in depth on content curation in a later post, as this topic deserves a post all on it’s own.

However, one thing that you must do when copying someone else’s content, and is very important, is to make sure that you give a link back to the original source as not to receive cease and desist letters from angry publishers. It’s only fair to give someone credit for their material. You can learn more if you research the Digital Millennial Copyright Act.

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A few good questions that you can ask yourself about the content you are thinking of publishing are found in a post by Search Engine Land:

Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors

Cq: Content Quality

More than anything else, are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond being a simple brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites?

Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?

Do you offer real value, something of substance to visitors, that is unique, different, useful and that they won’t find elsewhere?

These are just some of the questions to ask yourself in assessing whether you’re providing quality content. This is not the place to skimp since it is the cornerstone upon which nearly all other factors depend. Continue Reading “Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors“

There are a lot of good points in this article. We also agree with a point that is made later in the article about content freshness, which we touched upon earlier about making posts with recent industry news. There is also more in the post that is good information about how Google is now providing what is know as “direct answers” and how people feel differently on whether or not it is beneficial for their websites.

Quality Backlinks

Okay, so now you have a good idea about creating good quality content for your Website SEO campaign. Now on to Backlinks.

Back in the “wild west” days of the internet, the quality of your backlinks didn’t matter so much, or really at all. The more backlinks that you had, coming from any source was…. good. The links could come from sites that were total spam or link farms. The sites didn’t even have to be relevant to your site or the link didn’t even have to be in a post or page that was relevant to your site.

Not so much the case anymore. Now days the general rule with links is quality over quantity is far better. Just a hand full of backlinks from highly relevant and trusted websites is better than a bunch of backlinks from sites that have nothing to do with your niche. For example a link coming from a contractors site to a dental site.

The definition of a quality backlink from Webopedia is basically just that:

“a quality backlink is a backlink that links to your Web site using your keywords or keyword phrase, and also appears on a Web site that has the same theme or similar content topic as your own Web site.”

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Because these quality backlinks are harder to get is one reason that the cost of SEO campaigns continues to rise.

And to be clear, we don’t care what anyone says about backlinks. Backlinks continue to drive the web, and without them your site will not rank. Google is working on other methods into their algorithms to help the search engine giant decipher who’s website should get top rankings, but is probably still years off.

So how do you get these quality backlinks? We found an article that has some great tips for someone that is trying to do SEO on their own. The article was written by Bamidele Onibalusi on the blog ShoutMeLoud.com

7 Ways To Get Quality Backlinks

Links control the web and links are one of the most important things to every webmaster. With the advent of Google, SEO began to gain more traction and and backlinks became a major element of SEO success.

Since building backlinks is very critical to the success of any webmaster, this post will be talking about 7 ways to get quality backlinks for your blog/website.

1. Article Marketing

For a long time now article marketing has been one of the best and most effective ways to get quality backlinks to your blog, even though this method works there are some things you must consider when trying to get backlinks through article marketing. This is not as great as guest posting and one thing which is very important, do article marketing on relevant websites only. For example, if you are a SEO company, you should post content on an article directory which is only targeting SEO niche.

Read the full article “7 Ways To Get Quality Backlinks“

That’s a good article on places to get some quality backlinks. We agree with all of his methods EXCEPT link exchanges. Link exchanges can be very risky, which is one reason he may suggest that you put the other person’s link on another website. This can help you from getting penalized by Google on your site, but at the same time make upset the person your are exchanging links with.

In Conclusion

So there you have it. As the search engines become smarter, quality must be a key part of you SEO campaigns. The search engines are understanding your content and when it sucks, they just won’t rank it. After all, it is Google’s aim to return the best possible information for a person performing a search for a keyword or keyword phrase as to keep users using their engine over their competition.

Almost everyone knows that emotionally charged marketing videos have a far greater impact on viewers than boring videos with someone just standing there talking.

An emotionally charged video can mean the difference between the viewer taking action, i.e. calling for your services or filling their online shopping cart, or just clicking the back button to go to someone else’s site or video.

In this short article we will cover 2 very simple things that you can do to help make your company marketing videos more engaging.

Video Marketing Tips

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Make Use Of B Roll Footage

The first thing that you can do in creating more emotion is by using what’s called in the business as “B-Roll”. What is B roll? The real short answer is additional footage inserted as a cutaway to help tell a story.

For instance, let’s say you own a roofing company. While you may have yourself or a spokesperson in front of the camera talking about how your company replaces a roof you carefully inspect all of the underlying decking. While you are talking this would be a good time to cut away to footage of your crew that actually has the shingles stripped from the roof and are inspecting the decking.

Basically you can use B roll to just get your message across by VISUALLY explaining and keep changing what’s on the screen to help keep the viewer engaged.

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If you are new to creating videos it can be hard to figure out what would make good B roll for you to use. Michael Maher wrote an article on shutterstock that can help you with making b roll of the person you are interviewing for your video:

Make Small Talk

During pre-production, you develop an overall feel for the final video. Is this an upbeat happy project? Does it deal with very serious subject matter? By knowing the type of corporate video you’re filming, you can plan for some additional shots — and the type of direction you’ll have to give your subject to capture those shots — well in advance of the shoot.

On the day of the shoot, spend some time with the interviewee to warm them up to the camera. One of the best tricks is to film while you and the subject have a conversation. Ask them about their day, their position with the company, or little details about their life, like if they have any children.

Capture Movement

While the interviewee warms up to you, take the time to capture their subtle movements. Are they grasping their hands? Do they fidget with a ring or watch? Are they checking their phone? These b-roll shots will add a genuine personality to the video, and you can cut to them at anytime. After you get a few of these moments, guide the subject to their mark and have them get in place. Continue Reading The Full Article Here…

In that article Michael has some pretty good tips for getting b roll of the interviewee. But we think and know there are a lot more ways to get good b roll for your video.

At Indiewire.com they recently posted this about other great ideas for getting b roll:

1.People. It might be laborious, but take the time to arrange to shoot
models for b-roll. Models acting out business scenarios, or healthcare
scenarios, or playing sports These are the most commercially viable
clips.
2. Nature. Take advantage of the scenery around you,
and consider doing it outdoors. Filmmakers are always looking for great
panoramic clips. Timelapses are particularly popular.
3. Science. Get geeky. It’s a hard thing to shoot yourself because
it requires both knowledge and innovation to get it right. Digital
producers depend on b-roll to fill in content gaps in their productions,
as necessary.
4. “Industrial” is a growing category and has
emerged as a top performer. These scenes are in demand — “warehouse at
night” is an example of a well-searched keyword on Shutterstock. It can be used to set up scenes for criminal activity, and more.
5. Big cities. Create timelapses that demonstrate
the regular hustle and bustle of city living. Show the dark turn to day,
how a blank landscape evolves quickly into a busy one. Read The Entire Article Here…

So those examples will give you some good ideas and starting points as to where and what to make your b roll shots of for your company video.

Add Some Great Music

The second thing to help make your marketing videos more engaging – MUSIC! We know we have mentioned this before in other posts, but it bares repeating.

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Take a horror flick for instance. There is always some dumb ass kid that is wondering around a haunted house and is getting ready to peak around the corner. How ominous would the scene be without the scary music? The same goes with your company videos, although you may not want to use scary music from a horror flick!

So how do you go about selecting the perfect sound clip for your video? Here is a good snippet from an article done by Danny Greer at PremiumBeat.com:

Define The Music Early

If you’re reading this, it’s my hope that you’re seeking out music for your project before you finalize an edit! You’ll be one step ahead if you determine your music choices early on in the production process. Planning ahead will allow you to:

Get your client’s approval on music early on. The last thing you want is to finalize an edit and have a client come back and ask for a music change.

Utilize the music in your editing pace. Cutting to the music to drive energy and pace while cutting against can create tension. Make thoughtful choices about how you use music to work with your video edit.

Stay within budget. Nobody likes production surprises… especially when it comes to money. Licensing music early could curtail the chances of a budget issue later.

Some editors prefer to create a VERY rough cut of an edit and try different music tracks underneath to see which might work best. Once a track is decided upon, they can clean up the edit to match the music. It’s a useful approach, but must be done early on in the post-production process.

 Continue Reading “How to Pick the Perfect Music for Your Video Projects“

Danny has some great tips about picking the right music for your video. We especially like his advice of making a rough edit and then finishing the video and making the video “match up” to the music.

One word of caution – don’t pick just any music to add to your video. Make sure you have the correct license and permission to use the music. Failure to do this can result in a couple of things happening, which are rather unwanted.

One, YouTube will recognize that the music is copyrighted and allow advertisements on your video. The advertisements can and probably will be your competition! Secondly, repeated copyright infringements can get your videos deleted and your channel deleted by YouTube.

There are several places that you can get totally royalty free music on the web. The YouTube audio library is one, just check if there is attribution required. You can also do a Google search to find a lot of places where you can get music.

So there you have it. The top 2 ways to make your company’s marketing videos more engaging. Just add some B roll and music and your videos should produce more sales and calls versus your competition that fails to use them

Your website is incredibly important. It will give your potential clients and future customers their very first impression of you and your business. For that reason you need to make sure that your site is appealing and easy to navigate with strong calls to action to get the most out of it and convert visitors to your site into sales.

But what are the basic components and must haves of a website to get the most conversions? That’s what we will cover in this short post.

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Mobile Friendly

First and foremost your site MUST be mobile friendly. You have no idea of what type of device people will be using to view your website. Phones, tablets and desktop versions must all be equally easy to navigate.

Studies now show that over half of all searches are done on mobile devices. There is nothing worse than viewing a website on your phone and having to pinch to zoom and scroll sideways to read the content.

Just a few short years ago you had to make a separate website that was for mobile devices and was rather expensive because of the double work involved. Not so much the case anymore.

The easy way to overcome this obstacle and make you site mobile friendly is by making your site Responsive. With WordPress this is generally an easy task as many of the themes you have to choose from are now responsive right out of the box. Being mobile friendly is also a big ranking factor for Google.

Attention Grabbing Visual Aspects

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When people first visit your website they need to see and be able to recognize your brand right away. You want to etch into their minds your company for the services that they need. One way that we like to accomplish this is with what is known as a slider. If you visit our Website Design page you will see an example of this.

Something that you need to keep in mind is that if your site isn’t attention grabbing, the visitor will simply click the back button and continue their search. You need to tell people who you are and why they should choose you over your competition for their business. Multiple high definition images as well as your own videos will help keep people on your site and get them to call you.

How YOU Can Solve THEIR Problem!

Don’t sell yourself short on content. Your site needs to have enough content that explains what you do and how you can help solve their problems, as well as why YOU are the best choice.

There is a lot of debate as to how many words you should have on a page. For SEO purposes, the more the better. But that isn’t so for human readers.

People have very short attention spans these days and want to get the information they need quickly and move on. Forget everything you learned about writing in school. Short paragraphs with only a couple of sentences work best so that people are able to “skim” your content.

Easy To Find Contact Information

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Don’t hide your contact information. Make it very easy to find and in multiple places. In probably 95% of all instances, your website is there to help generate new customers and sales. If they can’t find your contact info what good is your website?

It’s best to have a link to your contact page in the menu, on the sidebar and also inside your content where it makes sense. You also need to tell people what to do such as “Call Us!” or “Email Us” etc.

Social Media Integration

Social Media is dominating the internet. People like to share content as well as see what their friends are sharing. By having social media icons on your site you are increasing the chances of visitors sharing your content.

This actually has several benefits.

1. The more your content gets shared, the more people will see it and recognize your brand which can lead to more customers and business.
2. By having the social media icons that show shares and likes, it helps legitimatize your business in the eyes of the visitors.
3. More shares on social media gives you better ranking signals with the search engines.

In Conclusion

If you are going it alone on building your own website, make sure that you have these 5 items on your site to get the most out of it for sales and conversions. Yes, there is a lot more to building a website, but these are the essentials.

All of these are easy to implement, but you would be surprised at how many sites we run across that leaves out one, if not more of these necessary components.

Social media and SEO. There has been a lot of discussions on other forums and between SEO’s for years as to whether or not Social media properties can help with your SEO.  In this short post we will cover what we know and understand about how social media effects your SEO for websites and videos, and ultimately, your bottom line.

Social Media Benefits Besides SEO

What we do know about social media is that people are using it. Social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Will Facebook go the way of MySpace? Maybe, maybe not. But you can bet your last dollar that there will be another platform to take it’s place.

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So strictly from the standpoint of being able to expand your listening audience, you should most definitely be using social media. People are searching for reviews about your company before they choose you for the particular service that they need, and social media helps provide more reviews and exposure.

We also need to look at social media from the search engine side of things, as far as helping to establish who you and your business are. By having multiple social media properties that are branded with your brand, you make it much easier for Google to identify your company and your brand. 

If you don’t have any social media properties you are making it much more difficult for Google to justify your company and some suggest that the lack of social media properties are a negative signal to hold back your rankings.

Now if you do have multiple social media properties like a company Facebook page, LinkedIn company page and so on, Google see’s these pages and can connect them with your brand. Now when someone does a search for your company, hopefully not only will your website show up, but also your top social media profiles.

One way that our company ensures that this is the case is by connecting all of the sites together where possible as well as adding schema markup on the website telling the search engines that all of your social properties are related to your website.

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Then there is also the fact that most of these social media sites have the ability to perform searches from inside their platform. This makes it possible for people to find your services right inside of which ever platforms you decide to use.

Another point to take into consideration is that with social media profiles properly set up AND being active on the sites will also help drive traffic to your site, which is also known as Click Through Rate. Studies show that CTR is definitely a big ranking factor in the search engines, only behind backlinks. More people to your site should result in more sales as well, if you have a site with good calls to action.

So there really are some great reasons that you should be using social media to help grow your company and ultimately your bottom line, whether or not there are any SEO benefits for your website.

Social Media Likes And Shares

Now on to what we do know about the relationship between social media and SEO. As we stated above, it helps reinforce your brand with Google. In our testing we find that this alone does help with SEO as it reinforces to Google that you or your site is not just another spam site. Most spammers don’t go through all the trouble of creating multiple social profiles and creating a brand.

What about likes and shares? We have tested both together as well as independently, and have seen some fairly dramatic results.

With Likes, be it on Facebook or Google+, we really didn’t see any significant gains. However with shares, that’s a totally different story. With social shares we did see a dramatic increase in rankings in Google search. This was very easy to see with video rankings, which makes sense to some degree.

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We do know that when a video is shared on another profile that it becomes another embed. For quite some time embeds have been a great way to increase search engine rankings for videos. This is what happens when a video goes viral, it gets shared over and over and viewed over and over. But does the same thing hold true for websites? The short answer – yes, to some degree.

With websites we did see better rankings over time, although be it not as fast or as dramatic as we have seen with video rankings. We did notice that the more Google+ shares that a site has does help it rank better in the searches over Facebook shares.

One last point that we noticed from our testing is that social media profiles that were more active seemed to give us better results over social media profiles that were dormant or had very few posts.

So from our testing, does social media help with your SEO – YES! But the important take away from this is that not only will social meida profiles help with your SEO, but also your Branding, as well as giving you more out reach points to bring in and attract more new customers and clients to your site. It can probably be best summed up by not looking at SEO and social media separately, but instead that the two work together and go hand in hand.

If you aren’t using social media as part of your digital marketing and are looking for an Atlanta SEO firm to get it done for you, be sure and click the previous link to check us out!

Content marketing should be a core part of your SEO strategies. Not only is it important for you or your business to be using it to help rank your website, but also to engage, inform and educate your audience, or potential clients.

Content Marketing is a CORE part of our marketing strategies as it provides great results for SEO and attracting new customers. We will cover a lot in this article, the frame work of your posts, overcoming writers block and the SEO aspects of content marketing.

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First of all, who is going to write the content to go on the site. There are a couple of ways to go about this.

1. You can hire someone to write for you on your blog
2. You or someone inside your company can write posts on your site

If you go with the first option of hiring a writer, or letting your local SEO agency write for you, they MUST understand your business. It is important that they have a full grasp of the services that your business provides as well as any products. This is important so that the writer can provide VALUABLE information to the readers.

If you go with the latter option of writing the content yourself or someone inside your firm to write, then you don’t have to worry as much about the knowledge of the company services or products.

You do however want to make sure that you are writing valuable content that people want to read. The last thing that you want to do is to look at content marketing as a chore and to be just putting up content to add content. Sure it may help with your rankings, but then you are missing the other half of the equation of engaging customers and only getting half of the value of content marketing.

Content Marketing “Frame Work”

So you maybe saying to yourself – “I haven’t written a thing since College, I have no idea as to where to start or how to structure my articles”. Not a problem, I actually found a great article by Sonia Simone on CopyBlogger.com that lists the frame work of what makes good online content:

5 Remarkable Qualities of Effective Online Content

The framework: Education + Personality = Effective Content

1. Effective content educates

Over the years, you’ve heard us say: Don’t sell, teach.

Content that sells (whether you’re in the premium content business or you use content to sell another product or service) is content that makes itself useful.

Effective content teaches your audience something they want to know more about.

It might be fitness tips, parenting skills, or career advice. But it answers pressing questions and makes your readers’ lives better in some key way.

2. Effective content has personality

Aim to create a content-driven website that has personality, that’s reader-friendly, and that’s written to both educate and entertain.

Bringing a consistent voice and personality to your content is a lot of work — but it’s also highly rewarding, both personally and professionally. Continue Reading Sonia’s Article Here…

That’s a great article from Sonia, and we really like point number 2. Giving your content personality. To many times people write dull, boring information that they hash out. Sometimes it can be difficult to write so that it’s not boring with some topics, but like anything else, the more you practice, the easier it will come.

It’s also worth noting that later in the article she also writes that keeping SEO in mind is also important.

Over Coming Writers Block

So now you have the “framework” of making a good article. But what the heck do you do if you run into writers block? It happens to even the best writers. I’m sure Stephen King doesn’t just sit down and blast out book after book without running into that wall every now and again.

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Over at HuffingtonPost.com we found a very useful article where they asked 15 different writers what they do to overcome writers block. One of my favorites from the article is #11 – Don Purdum that backs up our previous point of knowing your business inside and out –

There is one, sure fire way to overcome writer’s block and that is to have complete clarity about your business.

I have five questions that I use that on average create over 400 highly specific, highly targeted topics that can be used to create one piece of content, for one person; who has one need, problem or desire.

1. What are the “specific” problems you are passionate about solving?
2. What are the tangible values your customers experience and how do they feel about the experience?
3. What are the “specific” problems you solve for each tangible value?
4. Who are you “specifically” solve each problem for (in detail)?
5. How are your products or services “a” part of “a” solution?

When you have that kind of extreme clarity then writers block is never again an issue!

Read the full article “15 Expert Tips For Unblocking Writer’s Block“

That is a lot of great information, and can give you a lot to write about for sometime. I fully recommend you read that full article. There are so many different ways to overcome Writer’s Block in that article from so many different people. It is kind of cool to see the different things that people will do to overcome writers block.

So now you have the framework, over coming writers block and what to write about. Now let’s get on with the SEO aspect of it.

Content Marketing And SEO

A lot of marketers forget about how important it is to take SEO into account for their content marketing. The biggest point I want to get across here is that writing for the reader and the search engines overlap. You can actually look at the services you provide, then look at what kind of search that service receives, then analyze the top searches for variations of that keyword and write your article around the keyword with the highest search. Ya, I know that read a little confusing :), but it’s really not if you just stop and think about it. Basically all you want to do is write your article around your service keyword with the highest search volume.

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Over at KissMetrics, Neil wrote a post that ties everything in this article together beautifully about why content marketing is so vital to your SEO and how it overlaps with customer engagement:

Why SEO Is Actually All About Content Marketing

SEO demands content. Content marketing is content.

There is no such thing as SEO without content. You need words, articles, substance, keywords, verbiage.

I wince whenever I have to say it, because it’s so cliche, but it’s true: Content is king.

We don’t argue about that anymore. It’s a truism of the SEO industry. Content content content.

And what is content marketing all about? It’s about content. The practical application of SEO (content) is the very substance of content marketing.

When SEO shouts, “We need more content!” content marketing responds, “Gotcha taken care of!”

SEO demands keywords. Content marketing means using keywords.

Here’s another feature of SEO: Keywords.

No one would argue that a fundamental component of SEO is keywords — researching them, utilizing them, and tracking your ranking of them in the SERPs.

How does one apply the use of keywords? How is all the research funneled into its practical application?

It’s called content marketing. The only way you can use your keywords is to be employing them strategically throughout your content. Content marketing consists of top-notch content, written for humans, and using the keywords that you’re targeting.

Obviously, Panda will nail you if you insist on stuffing your pages with keywords and over optimizing. But when SEO and content marketing do what they’re supposed to do — work in sweet harmony together — you’ll be fine. Read the full article “Why SEO Is Actually All About Content Marketing“

BAM! That is a FANTASTIC ARTICLE!  If you are doing your own content marketing, or even have someone doing it for you, YOU NEED TO READ THAT ARTICLE! It is full of a lot of great information and insights as to how content marketing is SEO and SEO is content marketing. And for the part that we referenced – “Content marketing consists of top-notch content, written for HUMANS!” is pure GOLD.

In Conclusion

If you aren’t using content marketing to engage more new customers as well as helping your web properties to rank in the search engines, then you are missing a rather large and awesome tool. Basically you are fighting against your competition with one arm tied behind your back.

WordPress websites. They are all over the internet. In fact there are almost 75 MILLION of them! That number now equals out to a whopping 26% OF ALL SITES ON THE WEB. So why is that? Why would so many people depend on WordPress for their CMS (Content Management System)? That’s what we will cover in this post, and why we love the platform so much

First of all, if you don’t believe us that there are so many sites running on WordPress, go ahead and Google it! There really are some incredible statistics that you will find about the platform.

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Web Design With WordPress

We think that WordPress is the easiest to use and to fully customize for your own needs. There are so many Themes out there to make the site one of a kind. It is reliable and for the most part, secure, as long as you keep your site updated! Learn more about WordPress Security in a previous post here. There are also tons of free forums that you can find to ask questions, or get help from if you run into problems if you are going it alone.

Of all those 75 million websites, they aren’t just stay at home moms or dads that are blogging about their day at home, or how to cook some awesome meal on the cheap. In fact this one statistic we found pretty wild from Tom Ewer on ManageWP.com:

14 Surprising Statistics About WordPress Usage

WordPress Is Most Popular With Business Websites

Of the top 1,000,000 sites in the world, the number of business sites (most popular with WordPress) powered by WordPress is five times the number of WordPress-managed news sites (least popular with WordPress).

This statistic is not all that surprising, as online marketing circles will often discuss WordPress more than any other CMS out there. WordPress also ranks high as one of the most blogged topics in the online marketing niche and nearly all its keywords have very high PPC competition.

Continue Reading “14 Surprising Statistics About WordPress Usage“

More businesses prefer WordPress. And from Tom’s snippet above, if you don’t know what PPC is, it stands for “Pay Per Click” for Adwords. We found that there are some MAJOR Fortune 500 companies that run their site on WordPress like UPS, EBay, Sony and Best Buy to name a few. So if you think WordPress won’t work for your business, think again!

Ease Of Editing By Clients

We also like running WordPress not only for our own personal sites, but for our clients as well. Why? Because our customers find it very easy to go in and make changes when they need too. It is very easy to log in and change a page or a post. This may need to be done if your business has added or removed some services, or changed prices, etc.

We understand that many of you may have never used WordPress  before and don’t know the difference between a page and a post. A page is usually just that. A page on your website about your services, your about information, contact information, disclaimers for using the website, etc. They don’t usually get a lot of changes made to them.

On the other hand posts – are exactly what this is. A short bit or snippet of information that can be used to help inform or educate your customers.

Bob Dunn just made a post over the weekend on BobWP.com that explains a little more about how to make a post or page on a WordPress blog as well as showing some of the visual editor and other working parts of a WordPress Blog:

How To Create Posts and Pages in WordPress

Post or Page Title

This is the title of your post or page. How it looks on your site will be dependent of your theme’s styles. It also plays an important role in SEO (search engine optimization).

You will see that you can also edit your permalink. If you choose to do this, only do it before you published your post or page. If you change this after publication, all inbound links to this specific post or page will be broken and a 404 error page will come up for the reader.
Editor Window

This is where you do your writing and formatting of posts and pages. You can create them here or paste them in.

You will find two tabs on this window: Visual and Text

Visual Editor

This is the view most people use. In fact, it’s very close to many popular word processing programs. It is also sometimes called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). But that isn’t true with WordPress. As you will learn, font colors, styles and sizes here will typically look a lot different on your website.

Continue Reading “How To Create Posts and Pages in WordPress” Here.

That is a really good post by Bob and does a great job of showing you and explaining to you the basics of the back end of a WordPress website. In fact the title of the post is a little misleading as he gives you so much more valuable information. Adding images and making the most of your pages and posts.

WordPress And SEO

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Lastly, we really like WordPress for the ease of performing SEO on the sites, or what’s also known as “On Page Optimization”. There are several plugins such as All In One SEO and Yoast that make things much easier. The first is probably more popular while the latter is more robust and also creates a sitemap for your website as well. A sitemap is just that, a map of your site for the search engines to crawl.

Google also loves WordPress. Why? Well Google really likes logical architecture on a website and WordPress is designed logically. Google also loves text based websites, which is easy to do with WordPress. Google is also trying to make the web better for all of the mobile phones and tablets searching the web and WordPress can also be made to be “Mobile Friendly” much easier than other platforms, which will give you a boost in mobile rankings.

While WordPress is very SEO friendly, it’s not an end all, be all for your SEO needs for your website, but it’s a good start.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. WordPress is the preferred CMS on a boat load of Websites for good reasons. If you didn’t think that it would, or will work for your business, then you need to rethink that. Just look at the examples of the big companies that are using it to run their businesses online.

If you don’t already have a website for your business, or need to update your existing site, be sure and check out our web design services.

If you don’t think your business can benefit from the use of Video Marketing, and more particularly, YouTube videos, then you need to think again!

We have been “preaching” for some time about how important video is to engage more customers, clients, make more sales and generally inform your audience about your services and products.

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YouTube has just recently released more statistics about their service this month, and these numbers just can’t be ignored. Here are a few of the biggest stats that can be applied to businesses that were released at YouTube’s Annual Brandcast event on May 5th.

• YouTube reaches more 18-49 year olds during prime time than the TOP 10 TV shows – COMBINED!
• Brands that advertise on YouTube during prime time instead of TV reach 56% of the 18-49 year old age  group!
• 6 out of 10 YouTube subscribers say that their views of a brand were influenced by a video

If you think those numbers don’t matter, or that your business can’t get a piece of that pie, then go ahead and sit back and watch your competition that takes advantage of YouTube surpass you!

These numbers also help prove that people want to WATCH the internet, not read it. There are some estimates that 1/3 of all online activity is now watching video.

Is your company at the top of the food chain for your field of expertise? If it is, or if it isn’t, video is a great way to help increase sales, which is what every company’s goal is. Do you know that a one-minute video is the equivalent of 1.8 million words of text. You need to stop and ask yourself how long would it take for you or your staff to create 1.8 million words of content?

Skyler Mills wrote an article on Grand Rapids Business Journal about he and a friend made a video and the resluts they had:

Video gives us a no “skim-read” option. Comprehension is immediate. Its ability to deliver an emotional response in a matter of minutes is unmatched by any other medium. The integration of video with social media sites makes it even more accessible and easier to reach, engage and inform individuals.

As a student at Grand Valley State University in 2013, I had the opportunity to co-produce a motivational video on exams to help students prepare for finals week. Attention from the video was surreal. More than 236,000 views later, our video has reached students across the United States and abroad. Colleges have contacted us directly to congratulate us and ask permission to use it on their campuses.

If two students with a camera can reach that many people, imagine how your business could dramatically increase its scope of influence with even minimal video resources. Read the entire “Reasons why your company needs video marketing” here.

Those results are fantastic. And imagine how much reach and influence your business could have if asked by another if they could use it. It’s also important to note that Skylar says for you to consider creating videos and the impact they can have, even with minimal video resources. Are we suggesting that you just create a spammy video with a couple of still pictures and no voice over? No. You will have to put some effort into the project. The important take away here is that even if your video isn’t a Hollywood production, it can still ad value to your company.

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At Social Triggers they also have a post that gives some reasons that video is so much better than text:

Your writing might show off your personality, but it’s just not the same, and I suppose it makes sense.

Text-based content is a very one-dimensional medium.

Video on the other hand is a triple threat.

Not only can people hear you, they can read whatever it is you’re writing (I tend to write on a white board).

But most importantly, people SEE your body language.

They see your eyes, your smiles, your laughs, your nervous ticks (if you have any), and much, much more.

And that’s the secret.

Body language communicates more information than you could ever HOPE to write.

Now what does this have to do with rapport? And likability? And building a business?

How I Stumbled On The Power Of Video By Complete Accident

A few months ago I released the first ever Social Triggers video.

It was raw, but it was the REAL me.

At one point, I stuttered, and said the word “implimication” instead of “implication.”

Instead of editing it out, I left it in, and moved on.

Insane?

Maybe…

But then I received comments like this:

“I really like this video for the simplicity and that you didn’t edit out your verbal malfunction.”

People realized I was a human being… just like them… just like you.

Read the full article “The Truth: Why Every Business Website Needs Video Immediately“

So there you have it – if you still think you don’t need to be marketing with video and YouTube, then get passed over by potential clients and customers that go to your competition that does use video.

As always, if you are in need of YouTube Video Advertising for your business – be sure and contact us. We will be more than happy to give you a free consultation on how we can help increase your bottom line with Video

Why Long Tail Keywords Are So Important To Your SEO

Keywords – the basis for every SEO campaign.  Target the wrong keywords and you will rank, but you may not see a decent ROI from your campaigns. Traditionally, SEO’s have gone after just one to two keywords together to target. Then you have longer keyword phrases, and these are generally 3 or more words together that you are targeting. Longer keyword phrases can also be referred to as “Long Tail Keywords”.

Long tail keywords are a must to be targeting in your SEO campaigns. Why? Well we are about to give you several reasons as to why you should be going after them and how much it can benefit your business.

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To give you an idea of what I mean, let’s look at the service our business performs as an example. “SEO” would be a rather short keyword to target. On the other hand “The Best Local SEO Consulting Services In Atlanta” would be a long tail.

So why would it be better to try and rank for The Best Local SEO Consulting Services In Atlanta over just SEO? Well, number 1 – SEO would be much harder to rank for. The reason for this is that this is going to be a “Global” search term, where as with the long tail it has a geo modifier at the end, so that I am only competing with other SEO’s in Atlanta and not all over the world.

Secondly, commercial intent or buyer intent. With the keyword “SEO”, the person performing the search could be looking for anything about SEO, such as “how to”, or “what is”. Our long tail keyword example has a lot better commercial intent. Click Here To Learn More About Keywords With Commercial Intent.

Nowadays people aren’t just typing their search either. People are able to just speak their search into their phones. With long tail keywords you are getting more natural speech patterns that happen from speaking your search. Ashley Faulkes wrote a post over on Mad Lemmings that explains more on long tails and also gives another example that I like:

The Power of Long Tail Keywords

People are searching more specifically these days, and often with complete sentences.

So instead of: best restaurant Zurich

(yes I live near Zurich)

People are now writing (or talking) : What is the best Chinese restaurant near my house in Zurich?

This trend has been increasing for a quite a few years. And it means that people are typing in longer phrases into Google, in order to find exactly what they are looking for.

This could mean a more specific location, type, piece of information and so on.

These are the long tail keywords. The less common, more specific, keywords people are using. The kinds of keywords not so many people are targeting with their content!

The Benefits of Long Tail Keywords

You can read a lot more about this in this article on Search Engine Watch, but the short version is –

Long Tail Keywords are very useful because:

• There is less competition
• The results are highly relevant
• There is often more specific user intent (they are searching for exactly what they want)

Continue Reading Here..

The very last bullet point “There is often more specific user intent” can also be interpreted as a higher commercial intent. His first bullet point -“There is less competition” means – it is easier to rank for!

So how do you come up with these long tail keywords?

The Google Keyword Planner doesn’t work so well for this. You also need to remember that the planner was also created for PPC, and NOT keyword research.

If you are having a hard time analyzing and coming up with long tails on your own, the good news is that there are a few free ways of doing this.

A great way is by using Google suggests. This method is probably best done on your laptop or desktop so that you can open a Word document or Notepad to keep up with the results.

No go to Google and type in your 1 – 3 regular keywords. Once the results populate, scroll all the way down the page to the end of the ads and you should see something like this –

That is a goldmine for potential long tail keywords for you to rank for! 2 long tail keywords were produced here – search engine optimization atlanta and best atlanta seo company. Now you can also look through those results and see if there are totally different keywords that have appeared that are related to your niche. Next take those keywords and put those into the search bar and check those results as well. In no time you can have a rather large list of long tails to target!

Sometimes, depending on your keywords, as you type your keywords into the search bar, Google will try and anticipate what you are searching for, so pay attention to those results as well.

We also found these tools over at LongTailGenerator.com and Uber Suggest that may help you as well.

You Don’t Have To ReBuild Your Website

Now you may be thinking – “Great! Now I have to completely rewrite my website!” –  I promise you that’s not the case.

Over at the Hosting news they just made a post that explains this:

An Easy Way to Target Longtail Keywords

You don’t have to redesign your entire website to target longtail keywords. Instead, you can start using your blog to capture traffic from these highly targeted phrases. It’s not necessary to target longtail keywords on your homepage or landing pages, unless they really fit well with what you offer. However, they make perfect sense in a blog post.

When you want to target a longtail keyword phrase, simply write a blog post around the keyword phrase. This will not only give you the ability to rank for the phrase, but it can also bring up the entire SEO portfolio of your website. Read The Full Article “Why do Longtail Keywords Matter So Much?“

That’s pretty sweet! And easy as well. This can also make it possible for your website, or in actuality, your blog posts to rank for a lot more terms and drive a lot more traffic which equals – MORE SALES AND CLIENTS!

In Conclusion

So to sum it all up, the biggest reasons you need to be using Long Tail keywords in your SEO campaigns are –

1. Less Competition
2. Easier Rankings
3. Higher Commercial Intent

So get to it! Find some long tail keywords and start writing some blog posts to target them to get more traffic and more importantly – MORE SALES!