Inbound Marketing - Content Marketing Benefits

How Content Marketing Can Help You

Published on October 18, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

The art of content marketing is perhaps the most valuable way to improve your SEO results in 2013. Content marketing requires the development of high quality user focused content, and strategic curation and publishing methods. Content marketing can deliver measurable improvements in organic rankings and bring forth other benefits.

Three Reasons To Use Content Marketing

Increase Social Signals

Social Signals are an important part of search engine algorithms. Nothing improves social signals more than providing content that users enjoy and want to read and share. Obviously not every business can create that great video that becomes a viral juggernaut but steady improvement in social signals means better SEO results.

When you post your content on social media sites a specific goal should be to generate (as appropriate) a Share, +1, Retweet, LIKE, Pin, or similar interaction. It is icing on the cake if you are added to a new Google+ Circle or get a new Follower on your social media business pages.

Earn More Links to Your Website

People link to websites, information and content that they like. Whether it is white papers, articles, videos, press releases or other informative content you can provide the content to which people will link.

The people who find your content, and certainly those that link to it, are almost certain to be considered relevant to your business thus these links pass the legitimacy test. Sharing your content increases the possibility of gaining even more links, and increasing site traffic, and further developing your brand.

Develop Your Brand

Business owners often fail to understand or appreciate the true value of branding. Branding should be valued as a key element of the marketing strategy for any size business. Branding goes beyond having a recognizaable logo. Branding encompasses every aspect of how people view and feel about your company.

Content marketing, even for a relatively unknown company, introduces your business to prospects and creates that all important first impression. Both prospects and customers that are engaged with trustworthy and valuable information will embrace your company. Ultimately, through a consistent delivery of high quality content, your brand will become a "first-in-mind business" when an engaged consumer needs your type of service or product.

Content Marketing Challenges

Because of the known benefits of professional content marketing, internet marketing companies and SEO companies are working to use this new approach. The challenge for most is that they lack adequate understanding of the proper methods and they lack the resources to make it happen. Content marketing requires more than the average website company or freelancer can grasp or provide. For content marketing success you must know how the pieces fit together!

Examples of resources are third party software to facilitate and expedite the processes. Personnel resources you need are internet marketing analysts, professional copy writers and social media experts. Content marketing failures result from trying to post low quality content to social media sites and using spammy promotions.

Professional content marketing requires strategic planning and implementation, as well as a deep understanding of how all of the pieces fit together. When it is properly managed content marketing delivers incredibly good benefits.

Hire an SEO Expert - What Really Matters

How To Hire SEO Services in Baton Rouge

Published on October 17, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Whether your customers are local or spread across a wide geographical area you can increase your sales when you hire an SEO expert. Before you hire SEO services it is very important to understand that effective SEO requires a strong skillset. Almost every website company claims to provide SEO but few actually know SEO best practices.

Risks of Hiring Bad SEO Services

If you make a bad decision when you hire SEO services it can cause long lasting and even permanent ranking losses. Poor SEO work, whether intentional or simply done from ignorance of best practices, now carries a high risk of search engine penalties. If you engage an unskilled person or company for SEO you are gambling with your sales.

Is A Local Company Better?

It is extremely important to hire a SEO company that is in the United States, and that does their SEO work in-house. In cities with populations under 1,000,000 it is always a very big challenge to find a very good SEO company. SEO companies in small markets simply don't have top notch talent and rarely have had to perfect their skills by competing against other top SEO companies.

Your chosen SEO company does need to be able to understand your business, types of customers and be able to relate to your marketing area. Ideally they would be willing to sometimes come to your location for a personal meeting, and certainly be able to provide convenient forms of communication.

For top SEO, results are the top priority, location is not. Through phone and email communications, SEO reports and seeing ranking results you will be able to assess how well your SEO company is serving your business.

Finding A True SEO Expert

When you speak with someone who knows more than you do, and tehy have a convincng tone, you can easily begine to view them as somewhat of an expert. The SEO and internet marketing industry is packed with people who espouse unfounded claims, ill-advised practices and mislead clients. We believe that you need to know how to evaluate and hire SEO experts.

Experience matters to some degree but can be misleading. Because SEO changes so much, SEO experience that is over 3 years old does not mean a lot for being able to do current SEO best practices. Ask questions about on-page and off-page techniques. Ask to see live examples of client rankings. Definitely ask about tier inhouse team, tools and processes. If they use outsource services, rely on free keyword tools and can't explain their SEO process then they are one of the places to avoid.

Local Search SEO

For the traditional brick and mortar store it is important to hire a company that understands local SEO. This means how to properly create and customize local search listings and business pages. How to create local search citations and how to improve local search rankings. Local search SEO requires techniques that are unlike what you need for organic SEO.

How well developed is your local search presence? Local search services such as TigerSEO Marketing offer a free local search evaluation and a phone consultation to discuss how to improve your local search presence.

Organic SEO

Is your site ranked well on Google? Organic SEO services improve your search engine rankings for specific search phrases. Organic SEO techniques must evolve in order to keep up with changes to search engine algorithms. In 2012 alone, Google Panda and Penguin algorith updates caused significant turmoil in search engine rankings. SEO companies using sketchy or outdated practices caused their clients to lose a LOT of business, and are finding it nearly impossible to help their clients recover.

These black-hat and novice SEO people rely on meta tags, keyword stuffing, cloaking, doorway pages, exact match URL's, blog wheels, link farms and other bad practices to get their clients ranked on search engines. These bits of trickery did work for a while but their use ultimately generated very negative outcomes.

Even the manner in which white-hat SEO is applied has changed. The proper ways to manage character counts, partial match, latent semantic indexing, content stucturing and off-page techniques have become substantially different in 2012. Companies that upgrade their SEO in 2013 are going to take a lead in search result rankings.

SEO services, and internet marketing services, have become much more sophisticated and complex. To get the best possible results, and mitigate chances of penalties from bad SEO work, you should abandon the notion that a hiring a local SEO company is necessarily better. If you want top tier results, you need to find top tier practitioners - wherever they are located.

SEO Trends Continue To Drive Professionalism

2013 SEO Best Practices Will Be Better Than Ever

Published on October 10, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

The 2012 algorithm changes have proven to be very effective in driving SEO best practices to more professinal levels. As we move into 2013 it is safe to say that effective SEO results will be the result of refined and more professional practices than ever before.

SEO 2012 vs SEO 2013

At the beginning of 2012 there was a plethora of websites that continued to hold high organic rankings that were achieved with spammy and black-hat techniques. By the end of the first quarter of 2012 Google implemented algorithm changes that forever obliterated vast areas of black-hat SEO. As Google continues to make algorithm changes it is important to rethink and rebuild your SEO structure.

2012 Google Algorithm Changes

In 2012 Google launched an initiative to improve search engine results pages by knocking out sites that have used black-hat SEO techniques. The 2012 algorithm changes included the bombshells known as Panda an Penguin, the DMCA penalty, link warnings and a number of lesser algorithm adjustments. These changes penalized sites that were deemd to be specifically involved in buying links, using link wheels, using plagiarized copy or content, and having low quality site content.

Transitioning To Better SEO

Sites that experienced profound ranking losses during 2012 will require significant hours to amend algorithm based problems and resolve manual actions taken by Google. For other sites, even those not affected by the 2012 changes, it is a good idea to make certain modifications as SEO preventative maintenance.

Changes we recommend are eliminating site-wide links, removing pages with low quality content, use htaccess 301 redirects for dead pages, create unique titles and descriptions for each page, minimize the number of outbound links, modify text content to avoid any signs of keyword stuffing, and update your XML sitemap. Pay attention to your link velocity, anchor text and diversity of domain sources.

Additional SEO tips are creating social media business pages and linking to them from your website, include some video content, and avoid using any "miracle SEO services". Certainly you should terminate any and all relationships with black-hat SEO people, and not use article spinning software or buy backlinks.

Vetting Your SEO Provider

To protect your site from algorithm driven ranking losses we recommend vetting your SEO provider. It is absolutely critical to know that your SEO company has a sound understanding of current best SEO practices, and knows how to make the changes that will keep your site in a competitive position. In all fairness, if your site has been negatively affected it may not be the fault of a prior SEO provider and not your current SEO provider. In this case, what matters is having an SEO company that can accurately assess the root causes and is capable of making the necessary corrective actions.

Branding Beats Spam

Google appreciates fair and legitimate marketing that builds branding and serves to inform potential customers. Spammy e-marketing techniques are the pathway to failure. Build your brand reputation with high quality content that informs buyers on features, benefits and factual data. Keep the sales pitch to a minumum.

As Google continues to improve their algorithms you will see significant improvements within the SEO industry. The poor SEO people may remain able to make a good sales pitch but their inability to achieve first page rankings for their clients will set them apart from the true SEO professionals.

SEO Copy Writing Tips

SEO Copy Writing Tips For Websites & Articles

Published on October 1, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

How to write search engine friendly, optimized content seems to baffle a large number of people. Ths article has been written to provide SEO copywriting tips for website text content, and inbound marketing services for content marketing such as optimized articles.

SEO Copywriting Basics

The most important thing to know and understand about SEO copywriting is that your content needs to focus more on the user and less on search engines. If you focus on search engine algorithms you will write quirky content that is anything but natural language. The final copy needs to be informative, persuasive and yet have the characteristics that algorithms will embrace.

It is very important to also understand where your copy will be used and its intended purpose. The best SEO copywriting services use a layered approach to develop high performance content. The layers of defining requirements, organizing information, writing text and adding SEO touches are basics. Even when using these basics there remains different ways to apply your SEO copywriting skills.

Use Keyword Research For Quality Traffic

If you are writing copy for a website you should focus on engaging site visitors, and generating qualifie leads. This form of SEO copywriting is geared towards increasing quality traffic.

Keyword Research using professional SEO software (not free SEO tools) is essential to your success. From the perspective of the sales process or sales funnel your keyword research can be clustered. Segregating terms in this manner will help you to develop appropriate content for your website. In some situations you may want to develop separate pages to serve each of these steps in the process.

Use Trending Topics For Increasing Traffic

Some SEO copywriting, such as articles and blog posts, are done to increase website traffic and build branding. In these situations it is important to get your message and company in front of as many eyes as possible.

Search Term Trend Research is the best thing you can do for this purpose. Using professional SEO tools you can identify hot topics and search phrases related to your business. Writing content about these subjects and posting it online while the subject is hot can increase website traffic. Because blog articles and posts generally have a short shelf life the trendy element is nothing about which you should worry. And building good content will help your long term SEO organic results.

Block Level SEO

Just as you should have learned in grade school, how you structure your content does matter. again, don't worry about the search engines, just use basic composition techniques. Determine your article or page title, develop sub-titles (headings) and then develop content for each paragraph. Your paragraphs should be related and stay on topic. Don't obsess with outdated concepts such as keyword density and stuffing. Write in a natural manner and avoid long sentences.

Special SEO Copywriting Tips

Any content that you develop needs a few simple touches to maximize its SEO potential. Be sure to make each paragraph heading an appropriate heading tag, add a phot or two and use descriptive "alt tags". If oit makes sense, link the images to a target page. Limit the number of outbound links to no more than two or three.

With deliberate thought and well organized information you can learn to write SEO copy for websites and articles. Remember that the purpose of your writing is to inform the reader. Quality content is read, shared and appreciated by people and search engines. Write well and prosper!

SEO Company Baton Rouge

Local SEO and Organic SEO for Baton Rouge

Published on September 20, 2012 by: James H. Hobson

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the umbrella term for the various tasks and elements that can be leveraged to improve search engine rankings. SEO work can be done for organic rankings (main search results) and for local search listings. Unlike money spent on short life print advertising, SEO can have a lasting benefit that generates more sales.

While this article is written around Baton Rouge SEO, the information here is relevant to any city that has been experiencing rapid population growth.

Unique SEO Needs For Baton Rouge

Since the post-Katrina floods the population of Baton Rouge has skyrocketed. For a majority of businesses this means a substantial opportunity to serve more customers. This presents a combination of challenges and opportunities that Baton Rouge businesses have never experienced.

The geographical size of the city has greatly expanded. A majority of these potential customers are not necessarily close to your business. The new residents are not familiar with the established businesses in the area. The new residents outside of your immediate area are very likely to be searching online for what they need. If your business has strong, competitive search engine rankings you can engage these new potential customers all across the greater Baton Rouge area.

Local SEO

The term "local" refers to online listings such as a Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and citation listings on local search oriented directory sites. Local listings are blended into the organic search results. If your business thrives on local customers then you need a strong local search presence.

Local SEO services are how to improve online visibility. To have high local search ranking you have to do much more than just "fill in your information". There are technical tricks and methodologies that are essential for improving the value and relevance of your local search business listings.

Organic SEO

The term "organic ranking" or "organic placement" refers to the websites shown in the main area of search engine results pages (SERP's). SEO best practices are continually evolving. Understanding how to rise in organic rankings and not get penalized by search engine algorithms requires knowing specific current requirements. Desperation can drive some to deliberately apply black-hat SEO to achieve high rankings, and some people innocently do harm to their site when attemping to optimize their site. SEO work, especially technical website optimization, must be done using only best practices.

SEO Best Practices

SEO best practices change often in order to compliment search engine algorithm changes. Buying books on SEO provide information that is probably at least one or more years old, thus outdated. Online forums and blogs may give poor quality information meaning that trusting advice online is not always a good idea. Because of the complexity of SEO in 2012 the best option is to hire a SEO company.

The on-page SEO items include:

• Create unique page titles, descriptions and keywords meta data. The use of a keywords tag is not necessarily used by all search engines but many high ranking sites still include this tag.

• Streamline your code and content to affect fast page load times. Ideally this would be under half a second.
• Do not use text copied from other online content. This will be viewed as "duplicate content" which is bad, and it is an illegal practice which can cause your site to be dropped from search results. You could be sued by the content owner under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
• Always use "alt tags" and "title attributes" that contain accurate information, and do not use these for keyword stuffing.
• Remove site-wide links and utilize rel nofollow on outbound links.
• Use a logical heirarchy for structuring content, and strategically plan your linking.

The off-page SEO items include:

• Building backlinks from sites that are relevant to your business.
• Establish Google Authorship and use it.
• Create social media pages and link to them from your site.
• NOT using services that sell links,offer link wheels or blog networks.

SEO Prices and Timeframes

SEO prices vary depending upon the amount of work to be done. The level to which your competiton has optimized their site will largely influence the timeframe to get first page rankings can be a few months to several years. The good news is that if you hire a good SEO company you are almost assured of receiving a multifold ROI. It's important to implement SEO as quickly as possible to get the bottom line benefits and prevent losing business to competitors.