Ideas for Business

Blogs are a growing tool for businesses. And for good reason. It’s a platform that offers organizations much more flexibility than traditional communications and other social media outlets. Blogs are engaging, authentic, and effective at persuading and influencing customers.

Is Blogging for you?
If you are a business owner, corporate executive or solopreneur, your blog offers an opportunity to drive dialogue in personal and insightful way.  Other advantages to business blogging include:

Credibility
Sharing knowledge about your business, industry, services and laws lets prospects know you are not only selling something, you are a credible resource; a fountain of knowledge in your field. Let’s face it, they are evaluating you against your competitors and looking for a thought leader who understand their needs and responds.

Speed
Updating your website, branded marketing materials, email and direct mail materials take time to update. If you are launching new products or services, breaking news or sharing new industry developments, what a better way to let your readers know quickly through a blog.

Boosts Web Traffic
Adding new content to your blog, using keywords, brings search engine spiders to your blog where a link to your website.

Sales
Blogs are excellent way to draw attention to your ecommerce site where you sell products. Whether you’re selling via your private website or online stores like Amazon or Ebay, promoting your products with a photo and optimized content, you are adding more SEO dimension and casting a wider net.

Getting Started
Today, setting up a blog is much easier now for non-technical web users. There are several free- hosted blog sites to choose from. Depending on your needs and requirements for control, the most popular free blogging software includes Blogger.com, WordPress.com and Typepad.com. Of course, if you have IT programmers on staff, they can retrofit embedded blog functionality into your existing website.

To keep on track and ensure you are blogging regularly, developing an editorial calendar and assigning one main blogger and several guest bloggers will be first call to order. Once you start fleshing out a list of topics for your editorial schedule, you will be surprised at how easy it is to come up with content.

Attracting Readers
Your blog on its own can spur traffic through browsers if you optimize your blog content to include your most relevant key words. Other ways to draw in readers to your blog is through your website, blog directories and social media tools.

Set up a business profile on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In and link to your blog and website. Research blog directories focused on your target audience so you can cast the net even further.

Keep your reader’s interests in mind. Be authentic, be accurate, and be informative.

Blogs are a growing tool for businesses. And for good reason. It’s a platform that offers organizations much more flexibility than traditional communications and other social media outlets. Blogs are engaging, authentic, and effective at persuading and influencing customers.

Is Blogging for you?
If you are a business owner, corporate executive or solopreneur, your blog offers an opportunity to drive dialogue in personal and insightful way.  Other advantages to business blogging include:

Credibility
Sharing knowledge about your business, industry, services and laws lets prospects know you are not only selling something, you are a credible resource; a fountain of knowledge in your field. Let’s face it, they are evaluating you against your competitors and viewing you as

Speed
Updating your website, branded marketing materials, email and direct mail materials take time to update. If you are launching new products or services, breaking news or sharing new industry developments, what a better way to let your readers know quickly through a blog.

Boosts Web Traffic
Adding new content to your blog, using keywords, brings search engine spiders to your blog where a link to your website.

Sales
Blogs are excellent way to draw attention to your ecommerce site where you sell products. Whether you’re selling via your private website or online stores like Amazon or Ebay, promoting your products with a photo and optimized content, you are adding more SEO dimension and casting a wider net.

Getting Started
Today, setting up a blog is much easier now for non-technical web users. There are several free- hosted blog sites to choose from. Depending on your needs and requirements for control, the most popular free blogging software includes Blogger.com, WordPress.com and Typepad.com. Of course, if you have IT programmers on staff, they can retrofit embedded blog functionality into your existing website.

To keep on track and ensure you are blogging regularly, developing an editorial calendar and assigning one main blogger and several guest bloggers will be first call to order. Once you start fleshing out a list of topics for your editorial schedule, you will be surprised at how easy it is to come up with content.

Attracting Readers
Your blog on its own can spur traffic through browsers if you optimize your blog content to include your most relevant key words. Other ways to draw in readers to your blog is through your website, blog directories and social media tools.

Set up a business profile on Facebook, Twitter and Linked In and link to your blog and website. Research blog directories focused on your target audience so you can cast the net even further.

Keep your reader’s interests in mind. Be authentic, be accurate, and be informative.

When you go about your link building campaigns, do you bother yourself with ensuring your links are varied in nature? That is, do you use the same anchor text all the time or do you strive to create a more diverse link portfolio? The truth is most SEOs only use one primary keyword for their anchor text.

Link diversity means several things. It isn’t all about anchor text. That’s only one part of the equation. The key is to build a link portfolio that looks natural.

Here are some things to think about in your attempts to build a solid link portfolio:

• Use between 10-25 different anchor texts for each web page you are targeting.
• Build your links from a lot of different types of websites (directories, blogs, forums, etc.) within your niche.
• You can also add a few links from outside of your niche if they are natural links.
• Don’t target only high PageRank sites; to build a solid link portfolio, you need links from websites with a varying degree of authority.
• Make sure some of your anchor text targets long tail keyword phrases while others target general phrases within your niche.
• You can also throw in a few non-keyworded links such as “click here” and “go to” links as those represent a different type of call to action.
• Don’t just link to your home page. In fact, most of your inbound links should point to an internal page.

A good link portfolio is diverse. That means targeting different types of websites for your links as well as different anchor texts.

Need to learn more about smartphone and mobile SEO best practices? Let’s start with a few statistics:

According to an infographic from Microsoft Tag, 51% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from a retailer with a mobile specific web site, however: only 4.8% of retailers have a mobile web site.

A recent study by Google, “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users” reports 77% of smartphone users visit search engine websites followed by social networks. And nine out of ten smartphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.). Mobile use is growing faster than all of Google’s internal predictions, with YouTube seeing 200 million mobile playbacks a day, according to Eric Schmidt.

To capture the market, marketers and advertisers are increasingly allocating budget to mobile. In fact, eMarketer estimates total mobile advertising spending in the US will reach $1.1 billion this year, which is up 48% over 2010. Mobile search is forecasted to account for up to 10 percent of search budgets with Google capturing 97% of that market.

How can marketers take advantage of the opportunity with mobile search & optimization?

Of course there’s paid search advertising on mobile as there is on the web, but our focus here is on content, social and organic search, so the following tips will emphasize what you can do without advertising.

Fundamental SEO Best Practices – Effective site optimization applies for mobile sites as they would for desktop websites. Search engine accessibility, keywords, content and links all matter with mobile. Keep in mind screen real estate is smaller for keyword use in titles and descriptions. As a primer, check out this post from the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Making Websites More Mobile Friendly.

Mobile Friendly Website – First, decide if you need a dedicated mobile site or if you will present mobile users with a mobile friendly version of your existing site.  If you happen to know that a significant number of your customers use traditional mobile phones, then a dedicated mobile site may be warranted.  See the “Mobile Filters in Google Analytics” tip below for info on determining your website’s mobile activity.

A custom CSS file can usually accomplish a mobile friendly site for traditional, internet enabled mobile phones or it may be necessary to develop mobile specific pages.

Smartphones can view most websites as a desktop browser would, only smaller and may not need such customization. Another consideration is that some features, such as Flash content, will not display on an iPhone. Hopefully HTML5 adoption will address that.  While smartphone use is rapidly rising, there are still a very large number of traditional mobile phones in use. A “mobile friendly” site isn’t exactly a SEO tactic, but if people can’t view your site, there’ not much use in it attracting search traffic.

Mobile URLs & Content - Because of advice given by search engines, many Webmasters have their mobile sites detect user agent access via a mobile device and serve up a mobile friendly site using a different URL such as

• m.mywebsite.com
• www.mywebsite.com/mobile/

That is no longer necessary and website owners can present the appropriate content using the same URL. rel=canonical can be used for desktop content.  In all instances, the same content must be served to Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile as what a user would see.  Advantages to a single URL include a single destination for link building and also to facilitate social sharing of pages via mobile phones meant for desktop consumption.

Mobile Keywords – When researching keywords, it’s worth considering that mobile search query strings, on average, are 25 percent shorter than desktop searches. As for mobile keyword research tools, Google’s keyword tool provides a mobile filtering option and the stats you see for Competition, Global and Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends are all specific to the device filter you pick.

Mobile Formatting and Layout - There are many resources for mobile website development. If you want to test how your mobile friendly website will appear, then Mobile Moxie offers an array of handy tools for testing websites on mobile devices. Tools include: Keyword Research, Mobile HTML Code Grader, Mobile Search Engine Indexing & mSEO, Mobile Website Emulator and Phone Comparison, Mobile Search Engine Simulation and Results Comparison.

Mobile Content – In addition to testing the mobile user experience, it’s also important to test the effectiveness of your mobile content. Delivering mobile search traffic to pages is just the beginning with effective mobile marketing. Make sure the content users are interacting with resonates and inspires desired outcomes. Achieving mobile content effectiveness draws on content marketing best practices by knowing customers, their pain points and interests, keywords and social topics. Then apply that insight to your mobile content strategy. There are numerous mobile marketing case studies to draw ideas from to see what’s worked.

Mobile Site Map – Websites that serve only mobile content can provide Google with an XML sitemap.  Non mobile URLs should not be included, but URLs that return both mobile and non-mobile content can be included.

Mobile Filters in Google Analytics - On mobile analytics, Lori Ulloa says, “You can use Google Analytics to track your mobile visitors without creating a separate, filtered profile. You can get info such as those coming from mobile operating systems, mobile devices and even mobile carriers. If you do decide that an app is the right way to go, the Google Analytics for Mobile Apps SDKs make it easy for you to implement Google Analytics in your mobile apps.”

However, if you do want to use filters to extract mobile data (arguably to see if you have a mobile audience in the first place) then Google Analytics offers options in both standard and beta. Filters will inform you how much of your organic traffic is coming from mobile, how they interact with your content and if they’re converting.

By 2012 mobile searches will account for 25% of global searches (Google Smartphone User Study). Consumer use of smart phones and tablets has skyrocketed and in keeping with best practices for changing customer information discovery, consumption and sharing needs, mobile marketing warrants serious consideration by companies of all sizes, industries and locations.

You’ve read my take on determining where to allocate search marketing resources before: If it can be searched, it can be optimized. That certainly means mobile search as much as it does search on the web. The question is, how and when your business will approach mobile marketing and more specifically, mobile SEO?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Quick Guide to Smartphone & Mobile SEO | http://www.toprankblog.com

It seems that most marketers are still counting clickthroughs as if that is all that matters. While clickthroughs can tell a lot about your content and your visitors, I like the idea of counting “heads that performed a specific action.”

It’s called Qualified Reach.

The idea is that you don’t just count people who show up on your site, in your Twitter feed, or who subscribed to your newsletter. You count the people who respond to your calls to action. Those are the ones who are your true actionable metrics.

Think of it like this. You walk into your local supermarket, walk down several aisles, have a look around, and leave. You don’t buy anything. You just spend fifteen minutes browsing the shelves and leave. Do you think that supermarket counts you as a customer? Of course not. They likely won’t even know that you were there. After all, there’s no record to prove that you were.

Having a visitor show up on your website and look around without buying anything is like visiting the supermarket without making a purchase. It doesn’t benefit the supermarket; and that site visitor doesn’t benefit you. Therefore, it’s not a metric.

Many social media snake oil salesmen will try to get you to purchase a sponsored tweet, or pay them to send a message to their followers on Facebook or some social media site. Ask them this question: What is your typical response rate? If they don’t have an answer, don’t stop. Keep walking. Serious marketers measure their responses. And you shouldn’t pay for numbers of followers. Pay only for a response metric.