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Archive for the ‘Search engine marketing’

6 Things Your SEO Specialist Should Do For You

September 05, 2010 By: admin Category: Search engine marketing 1 Comment →

Many website owners or business marketers who maintain websites or blogs understand the importance of search engine optimization or SEO. But they often find that worrying about SEO can divert them from the original objectives they set out to achieve.

After all, the point of a blog or website is to convey information with the ultimate objective of creating a stronger, more productive client base: finding new prospects, making new sales and building an effective client support system.

In other words, building your website or blog is primarily about creating useful, relevant content.

SEO, on the other hand is about website promotion. It is about getting search engine exposure so your site will come up high in searches for your most important keywords (search terms). SEO is one of the most effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your website or blog.

Who is the expert?

This is a useful way to think of building, maintaining and promoting a website. Content creation on the one hand, and website promotion on the other. These are closely related tasks, but they are different.

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You Need a Strategy for Choosing Keywords

August 29, 2010 By: admin Category: Local Search, Search engine marketing No Comments →

The first step in developing an effective SEM strategy is to choose the right keywords or search terms. As I explained in a previous post about keywords, Google runs on keywords. So it is your choice of keywords (search terms), along with aggressive keyword-centered promotion of your site that will build steady traffic.

You need more than one Target Search Term

Note: I prefer the term “search terms” rather than “keywords” because it makes it clearer that this discussion is about search-centred marketing.

Regardless of your business – and certainly if you are a real estate agent – it is tempting to assume there are just one or two search terms that you should concern yourself with.
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How Keywords Help You Get Search Traffic

August 26, 2010 By: admin Category: Search engine marketing 1 Comment →

As you get deeper into web marketing the importance of keywords will gradually begin to dawn on you. Keywords and keyword phrases are at the heart of how every search engine operates.

Why keywords are central to SEM

The way the search engines (SEs) work goes something like this:

- The SEs send out their “spiders” to “crawl” the web on a regular basis. They are constantly out there crawling away. As they go they analyse and digest the content of new and existing web pages.
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You Cannot Ignore the Search Engines

August 25, 2010 By: admin Category: Search engine marketing No Comments →

If you know anything about online marketing you know the importance of search engines – especially Google. For the last five or six years Google has dominated the online search field. You cannot possibly be serious about online marketing unless you spend time getting ranked in Google. There are other search engines such as Bing, but in this series of articles I will use “Google” to cover all of them.

There are two main types of traffic you can get from Google – “free” (or “organic”) and “paid” (or “sponsored”). Trying to get the search engines to drive “free” traffic to your website(s) is called Search Engine Marketing or SEM. SEM involves different ways of trying to influence search engines – especially Google – to give you high ranking for searches done on your most important keywords.
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Getting Valuable Links to Your Blog

February 06, 2010 By: blogeasy Category: Search engine marketing No Comments →

BlogEasy Link Building
Building Links with BlogEasy

Building inbound links to your website or blog is one of the most important ways to increase its search engine ranking. If you don’t know why links are important, read my one paragraph summary at the end of this post.

Now the age old question is “How do I get inbound links?” I’ve wrestled with this question for years and come up with all kinds of effective and not-so-effective ways to generate inbound links.

The link building method that I am introducing right here (Ta Da!) is undoubtedly the best. Here’s how it works.

BlogEasy is about building content in your blog or website.
Not just any content. It is well-written, interesting and relevant to your prospective customers and readers. And it is “localized” – which means it is about your local service area. So it helps reinforce your blog’s relevance to, say, “Toledo real estate”.

BlogEasy lets you post professionally written original content in your blog. Some of these posts are longer articles, some are news items, and some are summaries pointing to other resources such as videos and articles on other sites.

This is where it gets interesting. Let’s say we write a top notch blog post about Downsizing Your Home When Retiring and then post it on one of our blogs (or one of our members’ blogs).

So far, so good.

Now let’s say we create a short summary of this article with a link pointing to the full article. Then we put that summary in the form of a blog post on BlogEasy and make it available to all of our BlogEasy members as a BlogEasy article.

Now remember, the summary is a typical blog post. It is interesting to your readers in itself because it is a summary of some of the main points in the article.

But here’s the thing… Every time one of our members publishes that summary they are creating a link pointing to the original article.

Just like I did above. See the link above that looks like this:

Downsizing Your Home Article (Oops… I just created another link.)

That is the kind of link the search engines love. And that is the kind of links we can create for you with BlogEasy SuperLink.

Here’s how the BlogEasy SuperLink program works

1. Every time you publish 10 BlogEasy articles we will give you one SuperLink credit.**

2. For every SuperLink credit we will create a special article that will be posted only on your blog.

3. Then we will create a summary of that article containing a link pointing to your site and make that summary available to our members as a pre-written BlogEasy article.

4. Every time a BlogEasy member posts the summary they will be creating a link to your site.

Voila. Link building at its finest!

Can you see the potential here? Publishing BlogEasy posts not only gives you high quality relevant content, but it is an awesome way to build inbound links from just the kind of sites the search engines consider the most important – other active real estate sites.

Go ahead. Sign up for the Free 5 Day BlogEasy Trial right now. Tons of professional pre-written content. And now SuperLinks. This is an awesome way to supercharge your blog.

*Why Links Are Important – The search engines consider an inbound link to your site a “vote” indicating that someone else found your content interesting and/or relevant. The more “votes” you get the more your site’s importance is reinforced. The more important your site is considered, the more traffic the search engines will ultimately send to you.

**SuperLink credits awarded only to non-trial (paid) members.

BlogEasy in Beta Soon

January 12, 2010 By: admin Category: Networking, Search engine marketing, Tools, blogging No Comments →

Within days we will be launching beta testing of a new blogging program we are calling “BlogEasy”.

BlogEasy is meant to do just what the name implies: make it easy to create and post to a blog. Apart from a lack of traffic, the biggest problem with having a blog is creating and posting content. That is what BlogEasy is meant to (at least partially) solve.

We will be providing blog content in various categories – real estate related categories to begin with. These will be short articles – approximately 250-300 words – focusing on specific key words relevant to your area of interest.

The system will “spin” various components in each article so each downloaded version contains unique wording. Articles will also contain “location variables” so they will reinforce the local relevance of the article to your local area.

Subscribers will have access to approximately 20 unique articles a month drawn from our article library. The library will grow each month as new articles are added.

Current AgentMapIt members will be able to sign up for the beta program which will give them free membership for some time period between 3 and 6 months (depending on demand). Interested members can sign up by leaving a comment here.

Citations and Local Web Search

January 02, 2010 By: admin Category: Local Search, Search engine marketing, web marketing No Comments →

As you can see from previous posts in this series about local web search and Google Local Business Center (GLBC), “citations” are important to your ability to rank in Google local search.

In fact “citations” along with inbound links are generally considered the second most important ranking factor after the actual content of your GLBC listing. Some local search specialists consider citations and links the most important factor – outweighing even the contents of your actual GLBC listing.

A “citation” is not the same as a link. It is a “web reference’ found on some site other than your own which contains information about your business. According to David Mihm , a citation “always contains your business address and/or phone number.”

The most important places to get citations are major directories such as

– Online Yellow Pages
– SuperPages
– Local.com
and many others, as well as well recognized local directories and websites specific to your local area.

To find out which directories and sites Google considers important for citations, do a local search for the keyword you want to rank in (for example, “Kitchener Real Estate” and then look at the current “more info” tab of your highest ranking competitors to get an idea of what resources are referring to them.

Having a consistent business description (address, phone number, website, email address, description) is important. An effective way to spread your standard business listing information to a large number of online directories is to use the submission service available from Universal Business Listings ($30)

How to Boost Results in Local Search

January 02, 2010 By: admin Category: Local Search, Search engine marketing, web marketing No Comments →

Here are some additional sources on information on the topic of Local Business Search. Most of these are blog posts written by local search SEO specialists. Try not to get bogged down in the technical details.

The bottom line, generally, is to make your Google Local Business Center listing as detailed and as “optimized” as possible. Inbound links and citations (reviews) are next in importance.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors – May, 2009

Anatomy of a Local Search Listing – Chris Silver Smith

How to Launch that Small Business Website” – Lisa Barone

10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search Algorithm – Matt McGee

Local vs. Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link – David Mihm

Local Landing Page Best Practices

Google local ranking factors – Andy Corp

Google local Ranking Excel file – Andy Corp