Displaying items by tag: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Practicing SEO requires you to make many decisions each day—but the most foundational decision you make is this: Will you engage in white hat SEO practices, or black hat? Or, to put it differently, will you be one of the good guys, or will you choose instead to be an outlaw?

With algorithmic updates happening regularly, and new SEO strategies making headlines seemingly every day, it’s easy for marketers to get caught up in the rush of what’s new. We can’t let fresh strategies or industry trend distract us completely from the tried-and-true practices that remain at the bedrock of effective marketing, though. One of those practices—not at all flashy, but deeply significant to any effort at successful SEO—is internal content linking.

In creating content for their company website, many small business owners feel torn. On the one hand, they wand to develop a site that’s pleasing to potential customers, and helps them brand themselves effectively. On the other hand, they want to make sure they have all the technical elements in place to find favor with Google’s search algorithms.

Your company website may be three pages or it may be 300; regardless, your homepage is inevitably the centerpiece, and likely the most important online asset you’ve got. It’s your company’s virtual storefront, and it sets the first impression that many customers will have of your company. As such, it’s important to do anything and everything in your power to maximize your home page’s impact—and that includes optimizing it for search engine visibility.

Most business owners take online reviews fairly seriously—as they should. Consumers are increasingly turning to sites like Google+, Facebook, Yelp and Angie’s List to help inform their purchasing decisions. In this consumer landscape, online reviews can carry a lot of weight, and can have a significant impact on a brand’s public perception and ultimately its bottom line. That’s not where the significance of reviews ends, however. They don’t just shape consumer behavior, but also search engine rankings. The question is how.

Online marketing has always been fairly keyword-centric, and not without reason. While it is certainly possible to overuse keywords, or to use them in a way that’s not strategically sound, having some good, solid keywords can provide direction for your content creation. It can also ensure that the content you develop is properly categorized and qualified by the search engine algorithms. Meanwhile, when it comes to PPC advertising, keyword research is essentially mandatory. The bottom line: If you’re thinking about digital marketing, you have to be discerning in terms of keywords.

Although it’s usually imperceptible to the general public, Google tweaks its algorithms pretty regularly; in fact, changes to the Google search algorithms are ongoing throughout the year, as search engines seek to fine-tune their product and provide users with even better, more relevant answers to their queries. Though most of these updates pass without any fuss, occasionally there will be a seismic shift in the way Google does business—an algorithmic update so significant that it engenders equal parts excitement and panic among SEO buffs and marketing professionals.

Most small business owners understand how important it is to optimize their website for maximum search engine visibility. Actually executing good SEO is a daunting prospect, though, especially for those with no particular technical background in this field. Not only is SEO a big concept, touching on everything from website design to social media savvy, but it’s also ever-changing. What counted for good SEO in 2015 may not be as effective in 2016. Simply put, it can be hard to keep up, especially for small business owners who already have a million other things on their plate.

Keywords will probably always play an integral role in online marketing. While keyword use can be both haphazard and counterproductive—as in the practice of “keyword stuffing”—smart keyword use is essential to good SEO & effective SEM. It provides relevant information to the search engine algorithms as well as to search engine users; it provides focus and direction for content creation. As such, targeting the right keywords is a critically important step in an integrated marketing approach.

Something we emphasize at enCOMPASS is taking an integrative approach to marketing. There is an abundance of marketing tools and resources to choose from today, ranging from pay-per-click ads to social media channels to YouTube—but wielding these tools in isolation from one another won’t help you reach your branding and outreach goals. To be effective, these different tactics must all be employed harmoniously, all pointed toward the same goal and working in a complementary fashion.