Zero To Sixty Marketing

SEO

Very Basic SEO 5 Part Series

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Shari does a great job explaining what SEO is not, a very important read I strongly recommend. This is a very basic synopsis broken down for the small service company that is just now learning that their site can do more for their company than just hold a place for chance visitors.

Search engines are not as hard to understand as it can seem to a smaller, service or product website owner. Most businesses understand by now that they must have a website so their company information can be easily accessed by prospective clients, but just having one doesn’t guarantee that.

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Link Strategies Will Improve Rank Issues

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Sharing links is a pretty common way to show interesting, fun, or informative sites to friends, associates. We don’t usually think about how that helps the website we link to, we just do it. Some research on a site we’ve been slowly upgrading revealed another common situation. The website wasn’t ranking.

As I shared what I had learned with the small business owner, I realized that all my words were falling on deaf ears. It can be hard to wrap your head around what it takes to be found online.

I wanted him to know that smart linking strategies can offset costs associated with marketing a company. Yes, you can, and should, hire a company to help you build links, but you can do some of it yourself and increase results while saving some bucks.

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Does Your SEO Expert Know What He’s Talking About?

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morningwax1Search engine optimization (SEO) is probably one of the most misunderstood terms by small business owners. It’s a huge topic; many things go into optimizing a website for search. Unfortunately, nearly anyone can pass himself off as an SEO expert, and many small business owners are taken in by “experts,” only later to discover that there were some serious holes in the actual expertise.

SEO is an easy upsell for the web developer. When the benefits of SEO are spelled out clearly, no business owner in his right mind will say they don’t care about a search engine optimized website. Clearly, there’s a financial incentive to the developer to sell SEO services, but not every website developer has enough of a grasp on the basics for it to be of any real benefit to you.

Likewise and for the same reasons, SEO on existing websites is an easy sell for the search engine marketing firm. Either way, you want your website to be found prominently online, not as #106 in the search results. You’d think a firm that specializes in SEO would know what they’re doing, right? Many do, but others engage in practices that will actually hurt your website’s rankings … and it can be hard for the untrained eye to know the difference.

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What Is Content Marketing?

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Content marketing is not sales and it’s not advertisement. It is, however, the most effective way to promote yourself online. Share your expert opinion on a product or method, teach others how to look at something more deeply or offer a differing point of view through well-written material you then share through online environments. Depending on the content’s usefulness, you may even be able to get it picked up in local magazines and other print publications. [Read more…] about What Is Content Marketing?

3 Things That Don’t Work When Content Marketing

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We get a lot of questions about content marketing. As my mentor and co-worker, Shari Voigt,  pointed out so well in her post to Express Marketing Memo, it’s the many ways you present your company interactively online. Useful information is in constant demand, and quite frankly, it’s hard for most businesses to  offer content effectively and still do the day-to-day activities involved with running a business. Many companies choose to outsource that function, but you can do it yourself.

Shari and I were talking about the difficulties beginners face when it comes to content marketing. As we mulled it over, we started talking about what doesn’t work. Basically, there are businesses we would never respond to because of their annoyance factor or the poor presentation. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to be you.

Let’s hit on those issues so you’re better prepared when you hit the online world.

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Secrets of Successful Small Business Websites

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If you build a better website, will the world beat a path to your door? I hate to disappoint anyone, but it’s not likely.

A great website will cause your visitors to hang around to see what you have to say, but on its own, will do little to draw new customers.

Now, if that great website is search engine optimized, contains fresh and interesting content, and has relevant links pointing to it from other sites … well, that’s a completely different story. Note that this isn’t an even / or proposition. Highly visible websites are search engine optimized, have a continual infusion of fresh, interesting content, AND hundreds of inbound links. If your site can’t be found, it’s missing one or more pieces of this puzzle.

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