Make sure you use hyperlinks in your postings. If the service you subscribe to doesn’t allow it, then dump them and get someone who does.  Without hyperlinks you’re just hoping someone links back to your page…not what I would call part of a successful online marketing strategy.   Make sure to hyperlink specific keywords in your ad copy that link back to…imagine this…a landing page specifically designed to cater to those keywords!  That will increase the amount of juice you generate and reinforce the message you’re trying to deliver.  If you link to ‘fantastic Denver hotel specials’ leading to a page about your hotel specials, you’re much more inclined to generate better traffic than if you just link to the homepage.   Did I mention it’s important for SEO purposes as well? Yes..it’s crucial to have an effective linking strategy in all your postings, including those in a press release.  Driving relevant traffic through specific keywords to a page that supports those words is an important part of your SEO marketing goals.

seoforceo.com helps to increase your ROI & social media exposure!

Increasing your website social media exposure is not just getting on Facebook and Twitter.  It’s ensuring you’re maximizing your exposure in a positive way while not over-extending yourself from a managerial standpoint in the social media realm of possibilities.  This is about taking your existing advertising budget and substantially increasing your ROI without significant increases to media spend.  Diligence and consistency will pay out in-house over throwing thousands at a media firm with almost no vested interest in what you do. Capiche?

First: Ensure your website conveys your message in a short amount of time directly to the consumer.  If you spend your money on mobile marketing and social media to drive traffic to your website, and then the website isn’t efficient with the message, you’re going to lose customers – fast.  Quick and concise message delivery is crucial to ensuring a high conversion rate and successful customer acquisition and retention.

Second: Retention is key, but recruitment is the lifeblood of any business.  Ensure what you offer your customer is clear and concise along all advertising medium: nothing is worse than spending thousands on a pay per click / social media campaign and driving all the traffic to your homepage.  I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve seen businesses make this error resulting in lost clients and declining ROI.  Deliver a concise AND consistent message across your entire advertising medium from cradle to commitment action.  Don’t lose the client on superfluous messaging!

Third:  Be prepared.  Is your website platform mobile-media compatible?  By 2013 (Forrester Research) more users will be conducting searches from mobile devices that from desktop PC’s.  This means that the traffic you drive from your advertising campaigns will likely be from a mobile media smart device.  Is your current web platform ready to accept those customers?  Is your advertising messages and customer benefit ready to be delivered in short concise phrases?  These are some of the topics which should be addressed now, rather than 12 months from now.  Don’t underestimate the intelligence of the average consumer!

Some of my favorite advertising campaigns suffer a quick death upon arrival to the target website.  I love the ad, adore the medium, yet upon arrival to my destination it’s like Disneyland is closed and I’m the last one to know.  What do you do?  Turn your car around and head to some other theme park, cursing Disneyland all the way…

These are just a couple of simple ideas to increase your customer retention and improve your bottom line.  Remember: customers aren’t stupid, but they need to be helped upon arrival to your website.  Your advertising has achieved a partial goal of getting them to your product, and it rests on the effectiveness of your website to complete the transaction.

1. Duplicate home, landing, and gateway URL’s in the targeted language dependent upon existing market penetration.  Yahoo and Google require pages to be in that specific language or they will not be included when considered for indexing.
2. Limited usage of longtail keyword groups.  Research shows single objective keywords are most popular among targeted language websites and therefore a core of strong kw should be employed.
3. Metadata tags, keywords and content must be vertically specific to each target language purposely in respect to culture and keyword demographic differentiation.  Successful keywords in English do not necessarily translate to another language and vice-versa.
4. Consider #4 attributes applied to different acculturations, i.e. countries of origin, geographical differences, etc.
5. Local search / geo-targeted campaigns.  Alternative language speakers tend to stay within their own community and emphasis on local search models (employing Google Maps for example) has proven to be very productive within that set.
6. Create appropriate links on all English/Alternative Language sites for language choice option and to build cross-link traffic and increase relevancy.
7. PPC campaigns on Spanish sites is at the present time very cost effective compared to similar keyword campaigns on English SE.

Most Popular Hispanic Search Regions

1. Florida
2. Texas
3. New Jersey
4. California
5. Arizona
6. Washington DC
7. New York
8. Nevada
9. Connecticut
10. Utah

Top Hispanic Search Engines

Google/es: 72%
Telemundo Yahoo: 17%
Latino MSN: 2%

51% US Hispanic adults view web in Spanish only.

Google indexes websites using these three methodologies:  crawling your sitemap.xml file, crawling your HTML sitemap and sub-sitemap files and crawling another indexed page which links to the new pages.  These are the best and most efficient ways of getting your website up and visible on the Google search engine.

If you’re looking for the slowest method, then just submit them through ‘site submission’ on Google.  It’s a matter of months vs. weeks.

If you’re using HTML sitemaps, then all of your sub-sitemaps should have a crawlable link to every page on the website.  Yes, I know this sounds simple, but many web companies miss this crucial step and cost themselves indexing of all their sites’ pages.  Sub-directories should be keyword rich and placed in the root directory.  Remember!  Do not exceed 100 links on the page or Google will ignore everything after the first 100.  If you have multiple pages over 100, then you’ll have to create multiple sub-sitemaps using the same methodology as outlined above.

XML Sitemaps (my preferred choice) must be created in the root directory.  There is a limit of 10MB per sitemap XML file.  You can create an XML sitemap with WordPress, Joomla, or any other CMS through downloadable plugins.  Also, you can create an XML sitemap through keyword searching for free XML sitemap services online.

REMEMBER:  Once you’ve created your XML sitemap and you’re ready to go, go to www.google.com/webmaster and create an account.  This way you can tell Google where your sitemap is and that it’s ready to be indexed.

Voila!

Let’s focus on the basics of page optimization, and a few things you should pay close attention to when reviewing and optimizing your website pages:

Page filenames should be keyword-rich.  www.mywebsite.com/12/3/page2?.html is not as effective as www.mywebsite.com/sales-widget/widget-1-uses.  Let’s remember to replace long URL strings with keyword-rich SEO text.  The keywords used in the title should reflect words used in the content and the URL string of the page filename.  Keep things consistent, and your ranking will improve!

Keep the keywords in the page title tag, and use the primary keywords first if possible.  This is known as tag prominence and is critical for effective SEO techniques.

Description Meta-Tags are also crucial to website ranking and optimization.  Start the description with your target keywords and use a question or questions to compel the reader to click on your link.  Calls to action in descriptions are much more effective than making statements, and will increase your conversion rates.  Be PROactive on your description meta-tags, not Reactive.

ALT tags are good to use for images with the primary keywords being first in the descriptive phrase, but keep them to a minimum.  Stuffing your page with ALT tags, especially repetitive phrases, will not help your optimization efforts and could actually contribute to keyword stuffing.

Next article we’ll discuss H1 Tags, Anchor Text Links, Breadcrumb Trails, and more!

Have questions? Please contact James Hawkins directly.  Good luck and Happy SEO’ing!

The salespeople are working hard to bring in clients.  The engineering department is fine-tuning the product as a premium deliverable to the end users.  Accounting ensures that there’s fuel for the engine and to build corporate growth.  Where does marketing fit when it seems the machine is running effectively?

The answer is: Everywhere.  I think Doug Karr says it best:

“I always viewed the great marketers versus the average marketer similar to the weekend fisherman versus the pro.

The weekend fisherman will go out and spend a lot of money on lures, the rod, the reel, even the boat. He enjoys what he does and drops a hook here and there to see what he can find.

That’s where the pro fisherman starts. He finishes, though, by remembering the date, the time, the weather, the water temperature, the size of the fish, the exact spot where he dropped his line each time, etc., etc., etc. Each trip he makes he collects information to refine his target, eventually assuring his success over and over and over again.”

Marketing in the Social Media age requires execution of goals based on research and analysis.  The sales people are bringing in leads, but are their efforts focused on markets that generate the greatest ROI for the least amount of effort?  How much time does a salesperson spend on each client prior to generating cash flow?  When a client goes to your website, does it tell the right story?  Do you have the correct value added tags and calls to action in the right place to create an effective conversion which in turn adds to the salespersons effectiveness and the overall corporate brand?  Are you spending money on a PPC program and not measuring the results accurately to determine if you’re spending in the right place, at the right time?  What trade shows should be you targeting, and where should you place your top executives to get the message to the most important clients?  Do you Twitter, and if so, where and how much?  Is the corporate blog doing its job by staying within the branded strategy enough to convey the message while at the same time being used to optimize placement on the relevant search engines? Is your website optimized at all and targeted for the customers who will create a conversion and put money in your pocket?

All these things are questions that a good marketer will ask of the corporate division heads.  All of these marketing ‘cogs’ contribute to social media optimization of the corporate website to being in the traffic which is most relevant to your product line.  A good online marketing execution depends on input from all aspects in order to achieve optimal growth in whatever vertical you happen to be chasing.

Want more information? Please contact James Hawkins directly.