Improving SEO Tactics…Educate Yourself

SEO is more than understanding the parts

The Internet is always changing, which means your business tactics should change. Constantly researching the most effective ways to reach an audience and adapting your business model will help you increase profits and maintain your clientele. SEO includes ranking, links, optimizing through thought processes, keyword strategizing, and updating. However, it is more than just understanding the functions of each of these 5 components to SEO. You must education yourself. I recommend not only understanding marketing, analytical language, and business intelligence (BI) tactics. This link provides a list of beneficial reads.

Advertising, public relations, and interpersonal communication are other topic areas you should explore. If done correctly, they will increase your business’ credibility and word-of-mouth (WOM) to various publics. People that are unaware of your company must discover it somehow. While you are building your SEO, I recommend improving PR strategies and advertising visibility to your target audience. One way to do this is through promoting advertisements on Twitter and Facebook. Even Instagram has promotions now. Visualization is key in today’s market. Corporate Social Responsibility through social media communication has proven to benefit companies.

Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest…

Also act as search engines. These sites require simple posts that readers can comprehend conveniently. Catchy phrases and infographics are key. Once again, I stress that you advance your skills in creating effective visuals. Educating yourself on visual communication is a great starting point because you will learn how the eye moves across a page of collective visuals.

Understanding Search Results

Organic Search Results–the results on the left-hand side of the result list after you search something through a search engine, such as Google or Bing.

“94% of all searches click on the organic search results!”

“SEO outranks paid search placements (advertisements)”

Watch this video to find out more great tips and reasons to combine SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media:

Increasing you knowledge of the Internet’s ways, how people use it, and when people find it most important to use will help you adapt your SEO and business plans. Here is an infographic which supports and explains the importance of Internet Technology (i.e. Social Media).

Photo Credit: http://smartdatacollective.com/

One last thing.

While you go hunting for blogs to read, books to check out of the library, and business strategies to create and analyze, I recommend you read this post by Vasilis Vryniotis. He highlights some main ways that SEO campaigns have failed. Before you implement your new campaign, be sure to check these out.

Happy reading! 🙂

Brand Imaging and SEO Through Social Media for YOUR Business

Social.Media.

Let me start by stating that you can’t second guess social media and must adopt a positive attitude towards social media use for your company. Social media is not leaving or decreasing anytime soon. Now more than ever is time for you to increase your social media skills and adopt usage of the sites that will benefit your company the best. I am not saying go and get a social media profile for every single social media site out there. Use your data analytics of the target audience you wish to seek and are currently contacting. Use that information and become more present in the social media community. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) increases a company’s reputation in two major ways.

2 ways to increase your company’s reputation:

First, when customers have a positive and regular communication experience with your company through social media, your company is then given more credibility.

Second, the more people you engage with on social media, the more interactivity, and the more word-of-mouth (WOM) communication about your company occurs. When you establish the positive communication in the first essential step, the WOM about your company will increase.

I hope you now have a reinforcement or new glimpse of the importance of CSR and how it can be achieved through social media activity.

Check out this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_83-jotayw

SEO Analysis

WEBSEO offers an in depth analysis of your website traffic and ranking. This will allow you to efficiently manage your Search Engine Optimization tactics and transcend your company’s presence in cyberspace. I cannot utter the importance of adopting strategic, effective, and up-to-date marketing strategies online. People use their smart phones everyday to search for what they want. That ability is at their convenience. You want to make the search for your company or your product/service is at the top of the search engine results because that will be what is convenient to them. They have the purchasing power, so convenience is acceptable. With the real time updates of software, information, news, and business strategies, an effective SEO strategy and data analysis are essential for your company to succeed.

Social media can boost your business because it is a free way to market your company and gain marketing research about your customers. It also has the potential to go viral, which reinforces the value of WOM as mentioned earlier. Giving increases your reputation, so be sure to engage with your community to gain followers. Lastly, you can get information directly from potential customers.

Here are some other readings I recommend to understand how Social Media and SEO tactics will help your company:

1. Social Media News

2. Social Media Etiquette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ootxiibcOWc

3. Facebook Posts to Promote

Happy Tweeting, Liking, and Analyzing.

Getting More Clicks. SEO. Increase Conversation

This week’s post will focus on a new tool to help you improve the structure of your links and increase conversation rates.

Structure Your Links!

You want to have a great resource that divides your link into various forms of data analytical charts. The link above is a great resource and guides you to a free resource that will do the following things:

1. provide you with graphs and charts that represent the type of links and their qualities

2. provide you with flow rank data

3. make a detailed view of the “Link Structure” of the page

4. give a number and list of all “Broken Lines”

Now to understand this better, I’m going to break down the purpose of the tool beyond what is listed above. Link Structure is just simply the name of the this new free resource. It allows you to study your SEO patterns, analyze, and optimize the structure of the webpage. The end-goal is to increase your PageRank flow through the output of statistics and other data results.

Increasing Conversation Rates

Overall, increasing conversation rates, whether they be through social media or Word of Mouth, the end goal is to use this increase of conversations to increase profits for your company. The use of landing pages is one way companies are increasing their conversations and engaging with potential customers. The link listed at the beginning of my blog post has some great insight. I particularly liked the definition of a landing page: “a landing page is the one displayed as a result of a search or just a click on a link, either from a SERP as an organic result or a paid one (banner, text ad, video ad) or even a link in a direct mail.” HOWEVER, for a company’s internal traffic, a landing page increases the chances and directs the reader to click on something–which industry calls a “vehicle”–and that leads the visitor of the website to a certain end goal…that may be to purchase something or to simply sign up for coupons received via mail or email to gather data for the company’s database.

SEO

http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/usability-seo-what-is-the-relation/

SEO experts are primarily concerned with five categories of improvement. These five categories include:

1. Rankings

2. Links

3. Optimization

4. Keywords

5. Updates

Overall, you can increase the pagerank within your own website by having an effective visual layout that controls the eye flow of the website visitor. Colors, graphics, and fonts are essential to maintaining the viewer’s attention. Here is link to a helpful article that goes into more depth about the subject.

Good Luck! 🙂

Social Selling, Hashtags, Google Analytics

What is Social Selling?

It is using social media channels to market the potential sale. Your company must use analytical data to create the content that will target the correct audience. Therefore, the marketing and sales departments must plan strategically and communicate the end goals properly. This relationship between the departments will result in a more effective marketing approach, reach the target audience, and have a greatly likelihood of obtaining the sale. I strongly advise you to watch the following video to understand social selling from different perspectives. This should help you start using the data you have and apply it more effectively through social media.

Hashtags

Hashtagging has become an extremely vital part of connecting to customers, gaining social media awareness, and creating trends. Creating a hashtag specific to your company will help you build your brand, promote a campaign, or create a trend. Hootsuite has a great post explaining the history and effectiveness of the “hashtag.” As you may already know, hashtagging has gone beyond Twitter. It is now used with Google+, Facebook, Instagram, blogging websites such as WordPress and Tumblr, and on commercials.

Photo Credit: http://blog.hootsuite.com/hashtag-infographic/

Combine Social Media to Google Analytics

I highly recommend you link your social media websites to your Google Analytics account. This will allow you to track the effectiveness of your current social media marketing strategies. Without actually asking the purchaser of your product, you will not know for certain that your social media marketing tactics resulted in a sale. What you need to focus on is the amount of reach you have attainted. You want to reach a vast amount of people, yes, but more importantly, you want to reach people that are within your target audience. This is because you have tailored your messages to attract their attention and persuade them into the purchase. In addition, you want your social media marketing to keep attracting them. You want to remind them constantly why they purchased from you in the first place and maintain their loyalty as a customer by remaining a positive brand. This can be done through your marketing, public relations, and advertising teams’ creativity, innovation, or sparking a feeling or idea such as a good time or happiness. The following video will help you set up or update your Google Analytics account to sync with your social media accounts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sIBrBga0fw

Happy hashtagging y’all!

Please comment with questions or if the post helped you. 🙂

Understanding Data Analytics

Photo Credit: biomedicalcomputationreview.org

Let’s break this down

Data analytics is complicated. If you are starting out as small business, there are many layers that are part of understanding analytics. You cannot read 5 or 10 blogs about data analytics, watch a few videos on YouTube and be good to go. You’re actually just selling yourself short. The research I have done shows that companies, especially small businesses, do not use all the advantages and resources of their analytical software. It more than cluster analysis and data segmentation. Most data charts organically result in a form of visualization. John Bates works as the Product Manager for Predictive Marketing Solutions at Adobe Systems, Inc. His blog post about data analytics helps you grasp what direction you need to go with your research and use of analytical data. He keeps it simple and to the point.

Find the “Gold Nuggets” in your Data

Get ahead now and understand how to interpret the data you gather, whether that be interviews, focus groups, surveys, or online website analytics. This video explains how important it is to be one of the companies that knows how to use its internal and external data. Even if you’re not good at mathematics, it’s all about knowing who to use as a source and use their “insights to transform the way the business operates.”

Advance Your Knowledge

Now that you know what the major challenges and mistakes are, I challenge you to obtain a more in-depth understanding about how to transcend your data analysis with metadata, data visuals, and advancing your skills in monitoring and cross-analyzing internal and external analytics you have and will research.

Here are some of the key steps of analytics:

Reporting what happened
Analysis
Monitoring
Forecasting
Predictive
Prescriptive

Companies that do not understand all of these steps will not come out on top in their industry. Educate yourself. I cannot stress that enough. These steps will be discussed in the video below. (You can stop viewing at the time length 21:40 if you prefer.)

Too much information?

Interpreting data has excelled and technology compresses and distributes the data as an advanced, complicated, and real time source of information. However, without human intelligence, your company will not succeed to its full potential. If your personal learning plan (PLN) and personal research is not helping you in the way you need, I recommend you outsource or hire someone who can interpret your data properly. However, do not sell your research sort; it will be beneficial in having the ability to communicate to your analytics expert. Also, outsourcing is a great way to ensure you are not developing tunnel vision also. Weigh your options and do what will be best ultimately for the company long term.

Questions? Comments? Please let me know. 🙂

Creating Hyperlinks: Internal vs. External

Photo credit: www.thesavvysocialista.com

Get an overview of SEO basics here if you need to understand where I am coming from on this blog post.

Internal Linking

When people search throughout your website and go to different pages, they are using an internal link system. This is important for your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You want people to stay on your website as long as possible. It is important to work on linking pages to other pages on your website. This will increase your page rank through the clicks per link on each page. Through this process, your website’s page rank will increase. By this, I mean your website will go up in rank on search engine sites’ results. When people search for a topic and your website is one of the top sites to come up on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine, this is great for your brand. This increases your brand’s awareness because more people are likely to go to your site for information. In addition, it is important to increase your SEO because it improves your brand image. What I mean by this is that the overall image will increase because if your rank goes up, more people use your site for information, and your website receives more credibility or authenticity organically. Because the website is associated with your brand, your brand’s credibility and authenticity increases as well.

Efficient navigation

Is key to keep people on your website. If they cannot search through archives, an internal search engine, or find helpful links, they will probably get annoyed, frustrated, and simply leave your website. This is the LAST thing you want in terms of increasing your SEO. Be sure that there are helpful hyperlinks within your internal network to increase navigation efficiency.

External Linking

This is another way to increase your brand’s image. External hyperlinks establish and reinforce credibility for your website and brand. Having these external links will not only increase your legitimacy but increase your page rank (traffic). This is where your networking skills need to be utilized. Stay connected and use your brand’s credibility, once established, to have other websites link to your website. This will pump up your page rank. Amanda explains in her article that a company will allow an outside writer to write articles on their company’s website in exchange for a hyperlink to that company’s page.

Any more questions? Leave a comment. I recommend you check out these SEO blogs too.

Happy Linking! 😉

SEO Words

AH! so many acronyms!

SEO, API, BI, OLAP and the list goes on! There’s at least a 100 digital marketing terms that will, if not already, be consuming your regular communication around the office or with clients. Digital marketing has expanded at a rapid rate. As a college student, I even find it difficult to keep up with all the different terminology floating around conversations in class, work, and my PLN list on Twitter. Following a list of people or companies on Twitter has helped me stay up-to-date on my digital marketing lingo.

However, I didn’t just place those four acronyms at the start of the blog for no reason. I have found in my past month and a half as being a student in my Social Media for PR class that these four pop up in most analytics blogs and articles that I read. . . so I want to break some of them down. Here is a helpful link with more that you may have come across lately.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a key factor in developing your brand and getting data to analyze and collect for your analytics reports. You want to be able to increase your rank on search engines and you can do this through various ways. Search engines have different formals to order websites. Research. Does updating your site increase you rank? Does keyword advertising have an effect? What types of content is searched (blogs, articles, photos)? And SO MUCH MORE can be applied in a search engine’s formal of processing data users’ searches online.

API

Application Programming Interface has been something I see more and more associated with the term metadata. Metadata is basically “data about data.” This can be about the structure/design or content of the data. Metadata API is then an organized overview of your analytics. Google Developers does a good job at breaking this down for further clarity.

BI

Business Intelligence is professionals analyzing the data collected. They various methods to transform technological data into useful information. Then, other departments of a company can use it to expand the brand and increase brand image and awareness. Also, BI should definitely be used as a key component to increase you SEO.

OLAP

Online Analytical Processing allows you to analyze many facets of information at once. This is a sector of BI. For example, you can analyze financial reports, advertising data, budgeting, and sales reports at the same time.

Keep researching!

Stay up-to-date with the latest trends in digital marketing. It’s just going to make business more efficient. Data analysis can be a huge assistance, so stay educated on the latest, fastest, and greatest analytics tools and software.

Please leave comments. 🙂

Bookmarking Websites

One of the key components to reaching your desired audience is research. With information updating in realtime, now is the best time to take advantage of social bookmarking.

How do I do that?

Most social bookmarking sites have a simple sign up process. You can share links that you like, make tags for specific topics, and follow other people and their tags. This is one of the best ways to get information you want in an organized way. Now you don’t have to waste time filtering and scanning through search engine results.

Popular social bookmarking sites…

include: diigo, delicious, Pintrest, and Newsvine. Wendy Boswell gives a good summary of some of these and others. I recommend these in particular because they tend to focus towards professions and other social bookmarking sites can be tailored more towards humor or entertainment. Either way, find what works for your audience based on your analytics data and research the latest news. Once you catch on to what trends are most popular, you can creatively deviate. Then, it’s time to collaborate with your advertising and public relations teams to get ideas flowing about how to create a trends and catch your target audience’s attention.

RSS

These feeds are a great way to confine your bookmarks as well. All can be accessed in one spot through a cloud server. RSS and social bookmarking websites allow you to obtain your saved bookmarks or searches from any computer, tablet, or smartphone.

Compare notes

I recommend having at least one other person give input on trends and topics to search and bookmark. This will keep the diversity flowing and keep you from potentially falling into a narrow focus (tunnel vision).

Also, be sure to keep track of information you have pulled and used that was effective. Compare old and new analytics charts. Create plans to expand your audience. Analyze potential audiences that you could reach that you have not specifically targeted before. People like to be targeted specifically. That way, you’re not wasting their time with information that does not pertain to them. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. Keep it creative.

Get more web traffic

Lastly, social bookmarking can be a way to increase awareness from users. Try to increase your followers on a social bookmarking site and bookmark your latest stories. BUT. . . do not over do it. Increasing your Google rank with positive information is important. You do not want your company to be related with spam or other negative web categories. Here is a good video to give you an idea of what I am talking about. Good luck!

Any questions? Please comment below.

Keyword Advertising: AdWords

Keyword Advertising. . .

is method that is useful in today’s real-time cyberworld. We are constantly tweeting, hastaging, instagraming, pinning, and so much more that bidding on keywords is a great way to gain money for your business. Staying up-to-date with the latest trends and topics of discussion online will help your business transcend in today’s global, cyber market. Consumers want what is convenient, so you as the business owners and managers have to figure out what it is that they want or what they should want based on their demographics and purchasing habits. Starting to research the lastest trends online is a great way to get started!

. . .Now that you’ve done some research

you can bid on highly relevant keywords. Keyword advertising allows you to make money based on how many hits or searchers that word gets in the cyberworld. So for example, every time someone “googles” the word you bid on and purchased you get money. This is also known as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. To gather this information, a system is used called Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Now, you do have to spend money on the bidding of the keywords, BUT it is an. . .

. . . INVESTMENT.

Typically and ideally, the money you gain from the hits will make the keyword advertising an investment worth the money spent bidding.

Make it worth your while

One of the best ways to figure out what keywords to use is through the use of keyword analytics. This data analysis will give you a break down of keywords that are relevant, irrelevant, and performable. Word Stream explains the difference between these and provides sample charts for you too see what this is all about. Also, a great overview of the information I have stated thus far can be found here.

To make it simple

This blogger, Travis, gives a straight forward approach to the process of researching keywords. Modifying your keywords will probably be likely when starting out. Here are some tips on finding where to buy keywords: Home Gauge.

Getting started

As a college student and from the research I have found, the most common place that has come up in my readings of blogs and articles has been Google AdWords. I am partial to Google BUT if you are someone new to keyword advertising and possibly analytics in general, Google is user friendly and has good demos and diagrams to walk you through the start up process.

Good luck!

Data Analytics for Small Business

I started doing some research on free analytic softwares because I am working with a smaller company in Austin, TX. Myself and a few others in my social media class at SEU are working together to help the new owner expand the company’s brand, improve scheduling and web traffic, and learn how to analyze his business’ data and customers. With my assignment being the later, I researched some free web analytics software. I came across a Tech Media Network article written by Nicholas Dragon.

Based on the owner’s request, I came across 5 potential analytics software.

Here they are:

1. Google Analytics: A 3-step sign up process that allows you to see data tracking within hours. It’s free. I really like that you can upgrade to a premium option if you have long-term expansion goals for your company.

Go to my previous post to learn more about Google Analytics.

2. Site Trail: Allows you to analyze social media and technology news of your website. The owner can add the website to your RSS feed and track the domain name of the company’s website. The weakness to this option of web analytics is that it limits to online information. If your company’s main function is providing tangible service, such as bus rides, t-shirt printing, or retail…you may want to use a different analytics software. HOWEVER, if you want to analyze or get started with a simple website analytics program, this is a good way to go. The analytics reports are favorable to the visual person as well.

3.Click Tale: A great option to increase website design and customer satisfactory with your business’ website. Thousands of companies use it, such as Domino’s, TMobile, and Walmart. It measures website users’ behaviors by using heat maps and form analytics reports. Both are great for the visual business owner and new/small businesses.

4. StatCounter: A free website user analysis. It’s main benefit is providing real-time data monitoring. Here is a visual demo.

5. Woopra: With the free version, you can track web users in real time, run analytics reports, and build labels for important customer segments. The small business version allows you to build scheduled tasks, notifications, retention reports, and more. Go to the website to learn more.

Those with the ambition of vast company expansion:

Adobe Marketing Cloud is another option with good reviews to increase your marketing communications and strategies. It includes analytics, campaign, experience manager, media optimizer, social, and target tools. Long-term, you may want to switch to this type of analytics or Google Analytics Premium.