Dan Spellman ( My Two Cents )

BMA Breakfast

 

I had the opportunity to commute downtown today.   Normally, I take my 90 minute commute through the Chicagoland area every morning.  Today, however, I was able to take the train downtown to catch a BMA breakfast event to learn more about SEO / SEM.

    

The room was full with a cross section of Chicago area marketing experts who were eager to learn more about Search.  While some of the attendees were relatively new to paid and natural search, it is always good for those of us who have been around for a while, to reinforce what you already know . . . such as:

    

·        Always use meta tags on your images

·        Paid Search (SEM) and Natural Search (SEO) strategies create synergies on the main search engines

·        Social Media for your business helps your natural search rankings

·        Everyone uses Google – make it work for you

·        Optimizing search is like trying to hit a moving target – there is always more work to be done

    

It was refreshing to take my team downtown to learn more about search.  For a limited investment, I was able to keep the group focused on one of the most important aspects of web marketing.   Hopefully, you are finding ways of keeping your team engaged as well.

     

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

     

Building More Doors

    

Running a successful marketing campaign is similar to building a house.  If your promotional offers were the rooms of the house, you need to ask yourself, “do I have enough doors leading to these rooms?”  Without a sufficient amount of traffic coming through these doorways, even the best promotions are doomed for failure.

    

One way to create traffic is to optimize your natural search results.  There are a number of blogs offering tips on how to improve your site’s SEO results and one you should read is the Search Marketing Blog from Engine Works.  In this blog, Kent Schnepp suggests that “by adding internal links to your content you can potentially improve your rankings and get new content quickly indexed.”

    

“Linking, both internal and inbound”, says Kieran Hawe of Webtribution, “are core to SEO success.  Hawe suggests developing a “comprehensive linking strategy that focuses on cross-linking within a website, within a network of websites and from external relevant websites.” 

    

This way, as the main search engines crawl your site, they are more likely to index your key pages.  “If you think about it from a robots perspective, the more links on your site that point to a given page, the more important it must be”, says Ray “Catfish” Comstock, a search expert with Business Online.  After all, if your not going to promote your site’s content, who will?

    

While there are a number of different areas to cross link within your site (within blog posts, on product pages, in the footer, on the sitemap, etc.), “the most important principle”, advises Dave Chaffey, “is to include key phrases used by searchers within the anchor text of a hyperlink to point to relevant content.”  Chaffey goes on to recommend reviewing your sitemap to ensure the anchor text in the links is customer centric rather than product centric.

    

Building this “house” of relevant content is an ongoing process.  Not only must you create additional compelling material for your current and prospective customers, you need to continually improve the sites’ SEO capabilities.  This is definitely the case after you upgrade your site.  “After a redesign”, suggest SEO authors Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin, “be sure to run a link validator on your website to be sure that those internal links have all been updated properly.” 

    

When it’s all said and done, your success will rely upon the ability for potential customers to find your products or services.  Therefore, you have to ask yourself “have I build enough doors?”

          

Until next time,

    

Dan