In this ten part series, I'll be covering many of the things that you need to take into consideration when planning a link baiting or viral marketing campaign. Today, in the last part of this series, I'll look at the idea of capitalizing off of your competitor's failures....
In Part 1 of this series I discussed the basics of a blog and some of the necessary steps to take before starting one. In Part 2, I explained blog feeds and how to optimize a blog. Now in Part 3, I will explain social media marketing and outline a selection of strategies for socially marketing your blog....
First impressions are important for everyone doing business online, but maybe more so for small businesses that don't have the benefit of name recognition and consumer trust. That desire to make a good first impression, though, often leads the small business owner down the wrong path. They decide their home page needs some pizzazz, or a "Wow! factor", as I've often had it described to me....
Google recently added Experiemental Search to their list of Google labs options. I spent some time playing around with it and found it quite interesting, to say the least....
This time, I'm searching for information. Citysearch has a newer facelift so it's time to put them to the test. It's been awhile since I've visited friends in Seattle and am planning to go there sometime this year, preferably during Bumbershoot....
Link bait and reciprocal linking programs have quite a bit in common. Without disparaging anyone who engages in link baiting strategies I do believe that many forms of link baiting are just a dressed up version of reciprocal links without the reciprocation....
No matter how hard you try, there is always something wrong with your website. There is always a critic. I have a friend outside the USA who thankfully alerts me of my 404 error pages, which I appreciate, even though I told him over the weekend he was making me scream at my own inability to be perfect....
My understanding is, if you have Meta tags with keywords and descriptions, this should also be reflected in your actual page content. But what if you have an ecommerce site and a homepage that displays mostly products and very short descriptions, and a menu with category names, etc.? In other words, not so much space for text "blocks."...
I've focused some of my affiliate marketing efforts in the area of "lifestyle pharmaceuticals" and birth control pills aren't really too far outside of that focus. I also consider myself a "domainer-in-training" and I'm making a conscious effort to vet every article that I read for a possible domain name purchase....
While I've always found Neil Patel's insight into the Social Media landscape to be pretty insightful, I think his latest Search Engine Land article about social media landing pages completely misses the mark. While Neil's proposed social media style landing pages may go a long way toward making social media visitors happy, I have to ask... at what cost to your business?...
In this ten part series, I'll be covering many of the things that you need to take into consideration when planning a link baiting or viral marketing campaign. Today we'll take a look marketing the unexpected....
Our company has built our own custom task management system that integrates with our SEO and Marketing client reporting system. It's great. In fact, I'm a big fan of task management. But having a task management system in place, and even when used properly, still does not take care of all of my task management issues....
Yahoo! currently offers two flavors of their paid inclusion program: Search Submit Express and Search Submit Pro. Your needs and the amount of control you want over your submissions will determine which program, if any, is best for you....
Blogs 101 is a resource to provide our clients and readers with a clear concept of what a blog is, why a blog might be a positive addition to their website or marketing campaign, and how to implement, optimize and promote a blog. Today, I will explain blog feeds and how to optimize a blog....
In this ten part series, I'll be covering many of the things that you need to take into consideration when planning a link baiting or viral marketing campaign. Today we'll take a look at the need to be able to act quickly when it comes to link bait and viral marketing campaigns....
What happens when you take a basically good idea -- the press release -- and get carried away? Even major companies sometimes engage in tactics that backfire. How can you make sure you don't make a similar mistake?...
Actually, this isn't between white or black hat search marketing. It's between SEM and flat-out marketing. When it comes to local search, it winds up I'll set aside my SEM hat and trade it in for that regular ol' marketing hat....
There is no denying the power of link text when it comes to search engine optimization. Whether it's your internal link structure, your outgoing links or your incoming links, the anchor text that gets used can have a strong impact on your search engine rankings. That's why if you are new to search engine optimization and you can fit just ONE thing on to your "linking to do" list this week, it should be banning the text "click here" from your web site....
In this ten part series, I'll be covering many of the things that you need to take into consideration when planning a link baiting or viral marketing campaign. Today, we'll look at the need for scalability....
With over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever to achieve high rankings for visibility. While reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques....
In this ten part series, I'll be covering many of the things that you need to take into consideration when planning a link baiting or viral marketing campaign. Today I'll explore the idea of using other people's resources to help you spread the word about your product or your web site....
When we are quoting development work for prospective clients we are often asked to develop a website that is search engine optimized. This usually brings me into a long-winded explanation on how developing a website to be search engine friendly is not the same thing as optimizing that website for search performance. Kind of like how building a car is not the same as making it ready to compete in the Indy 500. Those are two different tasks altogether....
Fresh, timely and informative content is a great way to entice visitors to come back and visit your website time and time again. For me, at least, the hardest part of writing is often simply coming up with the idea. Are you having trouble coming up with ideas for articles to include on your website or blog, too?...
StepForth's Blogs 101 is a resource to provide our clients and readers with a clear concept of what a blog is, why a blog might be a positive addition to their website or marketing campaign, and how to implement, optimize and promote a blog. In Part 1 of this series I will discuss the basics of a blog and some of the necessary steps to take before starting one....
Many companies are not aware of the different roles that various departments in their organization will fill when they begin to work with an outside SEO firm. What follows is a demonstration, in play form (bear with me), of which internal departments are involved in a typical SEO campaign and why. It also demonstrates some of the resistance that may be felt by those departments as well as what valuable contributions a company can make to help its SEO firm craft a successful campaign....
I wanted to discuss the possibility of developing a best practice/checklist guide for our company to follow. Our new initiative will be to launch 50 or so micro-sites focused on our key product categories. These sites will need to be rolled out quickly....
Trying to figure out the best and most lucrative linking strategy for your website isn't easy, some are better than others and some are best avoided. Over the next several weeks we'll take a look at both the traditional and more controversial linking tactics as well as answer some of the most frequently asked questions about links. We'll also look at what the published search patents tell us about linking, discuss linking comments being made by the search engine reps, look at the linking tools available and ask a handful of industry experts to weight in on their topics of...
When you think that your employees just don't listen or follow directions very well perhaps its time to sit down and start listening to yourself for a change. Get out of your own head for a second and hear your directions from the standpoint of someone who doesn't already know what you want....
If you've been in the search engine optimization business for any length of time you've heard the saying that, "search engines are blind, deaf and dumb," meaning that your web site should be designed so that the spiders can easily crawl through the site's pages and determine what the site is about. In other words, in order to be highly ranked organically, a web site needs to be crawlable and have excellent content; it does not need to look pretty....
Reputation management is critical for all businesses. Even the most customer-friendly companies have likely upset a few people who have vented their frustrations on the web. However, businesses with foresight have strategies to reach out to the affected in a way that will mend the relationship and allow for future commerce to occur....
In this ten part series, I'll be covering many of the things that you need to take into consideration when planning a link baiting or viral marketing campaign. Today, I'm going to look at the issue of building relationships and why relationships are necessary to launching viral marketing and link baiting campaigns....
It seems to be a single-sided debate. When you mention keyword use, all thoughts normally go to the search engines. Copywriting, however, is more about your human visitors than it is the engines. If you want truly effective SEO copy, you'll take time to learn that keyword use goes beyond the search engines....
Finding biblical wisdom in a pop-culture geek film! I love it! (Oh, I love the marketing angle, too!)...
Yahoo! has introduced a new class you can use in your page code to mark sections that are not related to the main content, such as navigation, menus, boilerplate text and/or advertising. Good idea? Bad idea? Something you could/should consider using on your pages? Let's take a closer look!...
When we find something that works, it may not be for the reasons we initially thought. Only after thoroughly analyzing one success, and seeing the big picture we can realize that the strategy that we thought was the reason for success is really just one of many pieces. It was really all of the pieces together that formed the path which led to success....
When it comes to viral marketing and social media, there's often talk of a group of people known as "key influencers." These are the people that serve as a sort of ambassador to the people online when it comes to marketing campaigns. What's often overlooked though, is an understanding of the sub-groups of people within the overall key influencer category....
If you're paying for marketing that will drive traffic to your website but have not spent any time or money providing a better customer experience on your website, then you might as well be paying your visitors to leave....
No matter what type of link building you implement, securing relevant links from "authority" sites is the one variable all linking tactics share and recommend for success. If you're buying links, dangling linkbait, submitting to directories or swapping shrubbery, links from authority sites are considered the Holy Grail of linking and what everyone looks for....
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