Building and acquiring links to your website can improve your search engine rank and boost web traffic—if you do it properly. If you don’t, you may do more harm than good to your search engine optimization efforts. A few common mistakes during the ongoing website optimization process can waste your time, lower your ranking and even cost you money in the long run, so plan your strategy with discretion. Avoiding the most common link building mistakes makes it easier to increase web traffic while maintaining your credibility with users and search engines.

Don’t Buy Links
The web is rife with low-quality online marketing services peddling cheap backlinks. Tempting as it may be to spend a few bucks on a few hundred links to your site, these aren’t what the search engines consider quality links—and they will bust you. Once Google identifies a large portion of your backlinks to be from irrelevant, low-quality sites, they’ll penalize you with either manual penalties or ongoing algorithm updates that will ultimately lower your rankings. While legitimate online marketing services providers can help your site with quality backlinks that enhance your search engine optimization efforts, beware the discount merchants.

Avoid Bulk Linking
Even if you’re building quality backlinks, doing too much, too fast sends up red flags with the search engines. Instead of building your backlinks in large groups, space them out and build with consistency. Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules for how many backlinks you can build within a certain time period without becoming conspicuous (and it there are, Google is smart not to share them). If you’re concerned about drawing the wrong kind of attention with your link building, consult with an online marketing services provider for advice on enhancing your search engine optimization with proper backlinking efforts to ultimately increase your web traffic.

Resist Repeating Yourself
Just as duplicate text is bad for website optimization, repeating yourself with your link building devalues your work—at least, as far as the search engine crawlers are concerned. Vary the anchor text among your backlinks and make sure that every link actually leads where the anchor text or surrounding content suggests. Indiscriminately building links that all direct toward your homepage, for example, devalues them to the search engines. Just remember that whether you’re enhancing your on-site search engine optimization or building backlinks to your site, duplicating your content and your efforts hurts—not helps—your web traffic.

What are Common Search Engine Optimization Link Building Mistakes? is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization

Writing effective content can be difficult, but it may not matter if your content does not see many readers. It is important to not only write strong content, but also craft it effectively using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques so that it can be found by search engines.

Writing effective blog posts and articles for search engine marketing may seem like a difficult task, but it is actually rather simple. As long as the writer follows the proper search engine optimization guidelines, then content writing can be very simple. These 5 steps should always be kept in mind when writing content for SEO.

1. Write Effective Headlines- The headline is possibly the most important part of the entire article. If a reader’s attention is not caught within a matter of seconds, most likely they will not read the rest of the content. Similarly, search engines highly value this component of your content.  You should not only seek to write a provoking, relevant headline for potential readers, but also include appropriate keywords in the headline for effective search engine marketing. Doing so is an essential element and effective first step in optimizing your blog or article.
2. Ensure the Article is a Proper Length- Do not write only a paragraph or two for a blog post or an article. Search engine optimization guidelines dictate that the length of the content should ideally be no less than 300 words. If your content is not long enough, search engines will not assign significant value to the post or page.
3. Utilize Keywords in the Body- Your content should not only have a clear topic, but also a close selection of highly relevant keywords. Once you have inspiration, be sure to identify proper keywords that, more often than not, will naturally flow as part of the main body of content.  Every blog post or article should have a few keywords that tie in to the essence of the piece. Effective search engine marketing content looks natural and seamless, not forced. Much like critical readers, search engines can identify optimization techniques when they are overused. In which case, neither will value your content.
4. Make Use of Meta Data- Make sure that all of your blogs and articles maximize meta title tags and descriptions. When your blog or article title is written in accordance with search engine optimization guidelines, including the 70 character limit and incorporating essential keywords, your title tag is essentially done. The descriptions do not play much of a role in how the page will rank, but it plays a significant role in how the page appears to readers and whether or not it generates clicks. Rather than counting on search engines to select snippets of your content, you can write brief, 1-2 sentence summaries that incorporate your keywords. This helps ensure the message you want to convey, and the keywords essential to your search engine marketing, take center stage.

Using SEO-friendly content management systems, such as WordPress, Act-On, or Joomla to name a few, can make publishing and optimizing your content a breeze.

5 Tips for Optimizing Content for Search Engine Marketing is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization

With SEO marketing, you may have been told that it’s important to update your website’s content frequently in order to avoid stagnating traffic. But, how often is best for keeping your site optimized?

Frequency

Generally speaking, the more often you can push new live content, the better. This doesn’t mean that you need to have expensive, ongoing projects in the works. That could simply mean setting up a queue with new content and stagger the updates. Pushing new content sends a notice to search engines that there’s something they haven’t yet seen and that their site crawlers should come check it out again. Keeping fresh content means that search engines will crawl the site more frequently, and in turn, keep updating your sites index in their database. In other words, the more frequently you can update your site’s content, the more likely it is that your website will flourish.

Content

As for content, it’s important to keep content unique. That means that even if you push new content to various pages on your website every day, each page should have different content. For example, it’s not going to help if you publish one new paragraph to ten different pages–in fact, that is detrimental to the way search engines crawl through your site. Duplicate content is not only ineffective in terms of marketing, but it’s boring. Spend a little more time making sure the content going live is unique to its page, and update it often. Content can be similar, but word-for-word copies aren’t beneficial for marketing strategies.

Format

Of course, not all of the content you post has to be the same format. It’s generally better, interest-wise, if it’s not all the same. That means you can post slideshows, text copy, articles, even videos, all to keep your website looking updated, new, and interesting. Making sure that your visitors have more reason to stay on the site is never a bad thing, and an easy way to do this is by choosing different formats of content to post to your site.

How Often Do You Need to Update Site Content? is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization

Virtually any business can benefit from a well-managed PPC campaign, and for many, spring and summer bring new opportunities to drastically boost your ROI. The right PPC campaign gives you a serious foothold in your market, so as the temperature outside rises and the days get longer, it’s time to think about what a seasonal strategy can do for you.
While PPC is useful year-round, it’s also a highly customizable form of marketing that allows you to make changes whenever you need them. This means that you can adjust your strategy to accommodate seasonal business changes, opening up the door for better results.

You already know how PPC works: Your ads display on top of or alongside relevant search results, giving potential customers one-click access to your site. Tailoring your campaign for your industry’s peak season allows you to make the most of your PPC budget, and it’s all thanks to PPC’s unique customizability.

How do you do it? Just do like the ancient Greeks say: Know thyself. You know your industry’s trends, and when your business is at its busiest. For example, if you sell generators, hurricane season is one of your busiest times of year. If you run an ice cream shop, people are searching for you more in June than they are in January. When you invest in your PPC campaign accordingly, you can choose your audience based on geographic location and advertise to them during your best months for highly effective lead generation.

Even the type of PPC campaign you invest in makes a difference—especially in the warmer months. The rate at which people perform web searches on their smartphones is growing faster and faster—soon, people will use them more than PCs. This is especially true in the spring and summer, when consumers spend more of their free time outside than at their desks, using their mobile devices to make plans and find businesses on the go.
By investing in mobile PPC, and especially smartphone-friendly features like click-to-call functionality, you prime yourself for potentially serious gains when warmer weather hits. The easier it is for mobile users to find and contact your business, the better your lead generation—and almost nothing makes you easier to find and contact than mobile PPC.

Want to learn more about what a seasonal PPC strategy can do for your business? Get in touch with one of our experts!

Taking Advantage of Seasonal Business Trends with PPC is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization

Social networking and social media is no longer a new thing. For over two decades, social media has grown and evolved into something that lets consumers and businesses engage with one another in a meaningful way. Organizations can inform consumers about new products, events, services, and other brands that matter to them. Nowadays, social media networks have integrated itself on a global level as an integral part of our lives.

 Driving the Growth of Social Media

Millions of consumers with smartphones and tablets access social media on a daily basis. Despite the new portable devices that have Wi-Fi, the personal computer remains at the forefront of the social network experience. Portable devices such as netbooks, tablets, and phones make it extremely convenient for people to access their social media. Approximately sixty-three percent of social media users say that they primarily use their smartphone devices to access social media while sixteen percent uses tablet devices to connect to social media networks.

Takeaway Statistics for 2012

In 2012, Pinterest had exponential growth and Facebook surpassed 1 billion users throughout the world. Because social media networks are so accessible, people and businesses are signing up in scores with approximately twenty-three percent of users checking their social media accounts more than five times a day.

• Over one-million websites have integrated Facebook in their business processes.
• Approximately sixty-nine of follows are suggested by social network friends.
• Approximately fifty-six percent of tweets from customers are ignored; Engagement is the key to social media success.
• Since Twitter came out, there have been more than one-hundred and sixty-three billion tweets.
• The majority of users who use Google+ spend well over sixty minutes a day on Google+.
• Google+ is known to increase a website’s traffic by three-hundred and fifty percent.
• There are over five million photos uploaded to Instagram every twenty-four hours.
• Women appear to make up about eighty-percent of Pinterest users.

Propagation of Social Media Options

While Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are highly renowned, new social media sites and networks are being created every day. There are too many social sites to count, and they are adding a variety of social features and integration. Keeping track or finding relevant social media channels can increase traffic to your website.

It is no secret that Pinterest have grown exponentially last year. Though the growth has leveled out, Pinterest had the largest growth consistently on a year by year basis out of any other social media networks. Look at the graph below for a visual representation of Pinterest’s growth in comparison to other social media networks.

Social Media Consumer Usage and Customer Care Evolving

The use of social media when consumers watch television is evolving; that is even truer with online television networks. In June 2012, there was a reported thirty-three percent of Twitter users tweeting about television content. Roughly forty-four percent of United States tablet users and thirty-eight percent of smartphone users use social media while watching television content. In Latin America, that number is higher at approximately fifty percent.

Word of Mouth in Social Media

It was not long ago when word-of-mouth was limited to people that you were acquainted with; social media networks have far since removed that limitation. Social media allow businesses, and consumers to generate and receive meaningful information from an exponentially larger population. As a result, hyper-informed consumers can make purchasing decisions and talk about those purchases in social media. Businesses can develop brand recognition, render services, sell products, and provide incentives to people that use social media.

Engagement Opportunities in Social Media

Consumer attitude towards ads on social media still evolves. About one-third of users thinks that ads on social media sites are more annoying than useful. Research suggests that marketers have a significant opportunity to engage with people. Roughly twenty-six percent of social media users pay attention to the ads posted by their network acquaintances, seventeen percent of social media users feel connected to brands on social networks, and twenty-six percent of social media users are fine with ads relative to their profile information. Social media likes are the most common action that people take when they see an ad they like. It is also an effective way to build brand visibility.

Social media is complex and has several benefits for your business. The impact that social media will continue to have on business in the future is still yet to be determined but it’s safe to say that it’s already off to a good start.

How Social Media Is Expanding and How It Helps Your Business is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization

In the current day and age of online marketing, it is important to stay up to date on the best practices for running an online marketing campaign. Pay-Per-Click marketing is no exception. Like any other field of search engine marketing, it is always changing and all pay-per-click campaigns must keep up with these changes.

There are often many aspects of running a campaign that beginners overlook when running a campaign. Here are four common tips for running a pay-per-click campaign that you should not overlook.

1. Keep an Eye on the Quality Score- The quality score is a fairly new concept, as Google is attempting to make content more relevant on their searches and to improve the reader experience. Keyword stuffing is now no longer as effective as it was many years ago in optimizing content. There are many aspects to improving quality score. Make sure that the content is relevant to the ads, the loading times on landing pages are not too long, and that readers can find what they are looking for easily. If the quality score ever drops unexpectedly despite everything looking okay, it may be worth calling Google and asking about it.
2. Bid on Your Brand Name and Terms- Do not assume that you are already ranking well for your brand name and therefore do not need to bid on it. Sometimes, competitors will devise ads with bargains and sales that are bid on a similar company’s brand name to try to steal some of their customers. You can prevent this by making sure that you pay attention to your brand name through bidding on it.
3. Make Sure You Test Your Ad Copy- If you do not test your ad copy, how can you know if it is performing as well as it possibly can? Make sure that you remember to test your ad copy frequently. Always write different ads, with one being very different than the other, and see if any new ideas generate more conversions. You never know what wording resonates best with your customers until you try it.
4. Utilize the Conversion Tracking Option- If you can track your conversions, you can see which keywords are generating sales. Luckily, AdWords includes this feature for no additional charge! Create a Thank You page and insert the conversion code that AdWords provides into the page’s code. This will track your conversions for you and which keywords are triggering them. It is an indispensable strategic tool and should be used if it is not being used already.

Keeping these tips in mind is crucial for the success of your PPC campaign. Having a PPC campaign can be a great benefit to not only your website traffic and conversions but your overall marketing initiatives.

4 Tips for Managing Your Pay-Per-Click Account Through AdWords is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization

Negative keywords can be an integral part of a PPC campaign, but it is important that one does not use them incorrectly. Using negative keywords excessively or with poor strategy could eliminate potential searches that would be relevant or even prompt readers to action. There are therefore many factors to keep in mind when going about a negative keywords library. Here are 5 keys to keep in mind when working with negative keywords.

1. Avoid adding long-tail searches- If a search appears that is a sentence long, or longer than 6 words, then it does not have to be added into the negative keyword library. Miscellaneous searches are always going to happen and it is not possible to eliminate them entirely. The key to dealing with these searches is to try to find trends in search queries, rather than entering a whole long-tail search into the library.

2. Identify recurring themes in searches- Rather than continue to add in negative keywords whenever you see them, you can knock out multiple birds with one stone by identifying common themes. For instance, if you have a client who specializes in athletic nets, but you continue to see searches for fishing nets, then you can enter in fishing and fishing related items as negative keywords. Make sure that you use phrase match when adding them in.

3. Avoid using broad match- Only in certain situations should you ever use broad match for negative keywords. Broad match is difficult to measure and control as it pulls anything that is related to that term. By entering in a negative keyword using a broad match, you may be eliminating relevant searches without realizing it. Avoid using broad match unless you have a good idea of what will be generated.

4. Keep in mind certain campaigns- An audience can vary greatly by location. Make sure that you select the right negative keywords for each campaign. You can do this by creating a list for certain campaigns in the shared library and sharing them with the proper campaigns. Make sure you utilize the shared library effectively in your PPC campaign.

5. Stay proactive rather than reactive- Obviously, you can’t predict everything about how a campaign will generate searches, but you should always be anticipating what negative keywords to add in before they are clicked and use up PPC budget. This should start before the campaign, with negative keywords already implemented before the campaign goes live. But while negative keywords are being reviewed, a PPC manager should also seek to identify possible searches that are likely to appear based on trends, and remove them before they are searched for.

5 Keys to Using Negative Keywords is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization

Keywords, along with compelling and unique content, are still the foundation of any successful search engine marketing campaign. Whether you’re running an organic or paid campaign, having the right keyword focus will determine the quality of traffic generated. While everyone’s first instinct is to dive into the most popular and highly searched keywords, that may not always be the best strategy. In fact, using long tail keywords, generally defined as search queries containing at least three or more words, can make the biggest difference in the quality of traffic you attract.
Not quite sure how to differentiate between short tail and long tail keywords? Here’s a simple example.

Short tail keyword: digital camera

Long tail keyword: Canon Rebel T3i Digital SLR Camera

Here are a few reasons why you may want to consider adding long tail keywords to your strategy.

Competition

The biggest allure to short tail keywords is the potential for visibility based on the search volume of a particular keyword.  In our example, we can see that the short tail keyword delivers over 726 million results while our long tail keyword only delivered 1.9 million; that’s barely a quarter of a percent in comparison. Like any marketing initiative, the more competition, the harder it is to penetrate and the more costly. Including long tail keywords in your strategy reduces the amount of competition and yields better results.

Search Volume

It may be logical to think that shorter keywords deliver the most search traffic.  However, the statistics prove this wrong. The search demand curve, shown below, illustrates both competition and search traffic generated by keyword length.

While the top 100 keywords bring in about 5% of search traffic, long tail keywords generate approximately 70% of all search traffic.

Although higher search volume may sound like the better strategy, using a comprehensive list of long tail keywords can result in a higher amount of traffic to your site.

Cost

Keeping budgets in check is always important.  The most obvious difference between using short tail and long tail keywords in campaigns is cost.  When running a PPC campaign, generic, short tail keywords are much more costly than long tail keywords. The difference can be enormous – a few cents per click to close to a hundred dollars per click. While there is no direct cost associated with optimizing your site for organic searches, the higher the competition, the more content, the more activity and the more you’ll have to work to achieve any type of visibility for such keywords.  This, of course, translates into higher costs.

Traffic Quality & Click Through Rates

For the most part we tend to agree that more is better.  While more traffic sounds great, it’s important to distinguish between quality traffic and irrelevant traffic. Traditionally, users who use long tail keywords as search queries are further along the buying cycle and are much more qualified for your particular products or services.  Attracting traffic from visitors who already know what they are looking for will result in better click through rates from your ads or organic search results, on top of being better prospects.

Conversion Rates

This is by far one of the best benefits of using long- tail keywords in your marketing campaigns. Since users with highly, specific search queries already have in mind what they want, there is no need to try and convince them of what they want or sell them anything because they already know. Users who search using long tail keywords in their searches are more likely to buy if the price is right.

Short or Long?

On most levels long tail keywords outperform generic, short tail keywords in key performance metrics. While this doesn’t mean a campaign should exclude short tail keywords, it does mean that a good long tail keyword strategy should be in place for any and all of your search campaigns. Creating a long tail keyword strategy is no easy task.  It will take time and effort, but doing so it can provide a better way to connect to your target audience by offering them specific and targeted ads or content to meet their needs.

The Secret Behind Long Tail Keywords: Using Long Tail Keywords for Better Traffic and ROI is a post from: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Pay Per Click Management (PPC) Local Maps Optimization