Improving SEO Tactics…Educate Yourself

Photo Credit: www.mylocalseoguy.com
Photo Credit: www.mylocalseoguy.com

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/
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

Credit: www.intersectionconsulting.com
Credit: www.intersectionconsulting.com

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:

 

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

3. Facebook Posts to Promote

Happy Tweeting, Liking, and Analyzing.

Credit: ignitordigital.com
Credit: ignitordigital.com

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/
      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/
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. 🙂

Creating Hyperlinks: Internal vs. External

Photo credit: www.thesavvysocialista.com
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! 😉

 

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. 

I appreciate your feedback. 

 

From WordPress to Millions

Less than a decade ago, the Internet started booming with social media. Trends, likes, hashtags, retweets all brings the cyber community together at lighting speed! Interestingly enough the bloggers got creative and some even became extremely successful. OneExtraPixel gives a list of 10 entrepreneurs that used WordPress as a launch pad for makin’ the big bucks. Anything from discount codes to how to invest in stocks has made these young people rich.

Ingenuity and specificity of your blog makes you an attractive blogger. In my social media couse, I’ve quickly learned the complexity of blogging. It’s not so much a challenge. It just allows you to take so many different avenues for your blog. The theme, layout, colors, font (typeface 😉 ) and various media input options give you so many combination options. It’s every creative person’s dream on a screen!

Besides creativity, it’s great for the organized people out there. Cyberspace might have an overload of information, but the one thing that helps us different users are the trends. The ability to search for exactly what you want AND when you want the information. Info at your fingertips. AND it’s typically free! Doesn’t get much better than that. . . especially for college folks like me.

Some of the trends I find myself following are fitness, jazz music, and the latest fashion loves. I find that these typically have cool, inspiring quotes. Whether they be lyrics to a song sung by the flawless Ella Fitzgerald, the quotes of the top designers, or photo inspirations with great workout tips on Instagram…I’m down with whatever can make my day better!

Here’s a view great cites:

Laugh it up healthies

Herbalife guru

On Green Dolphin Street

STREET fashion lovers

 

So basically this week has been learning all these details about blogging and figuring out where I’m gonna take this blog this semester. I’ve decided I’m gonna try to make these posts interesting by using the topics I learn each week and mixing in a personal flare to the posts. How does ‘My life as a Public Relations Student’ sound to you? Too broad or specific enough? Not quite sure yet. Just gonna roll with it for now and see where this next week takes me. Hopefully something more specific will come to me so I can stand out against all these creative people…especially the talented peeps in my class.

 

Be prepared cyber world people… awesome blogs coming your way for SEU students!  You’ve been warned 😉