Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager

When managed properly, company blogs are a great way to keep readers up to date on company and industry knowledge, and can be very useful in improving a company’s online visibility. Implementing the following optimization best practices can help improve both your blog and your website’s organic visibility within the search engines:

• Use a relevant keyword in your domain: When naming your blog, consider using an important keyword in your URL.

• Use relevant keywords in content: When writing content, consider common keywords and key phrases people would use to learn about your product(s) or industry. Include these keywords within your blog title and body copy with the most important keyword included in your title.

• Link to various pages of your website: Include links back to your website within your content to increase the number of incoming links to your website. Be sure to link to more than just your homepage.

• Include relevant anchor text: When linking to another page, use relevant keywords as your anchor text and hyperlink these accordingly.

• Submit to directories: There are many online directories where you can submit your blog to further increase its reach, such as BlogCatalog.com. This will increase the number of relevant back-links to your blog, increasing the importance placed on your blog by the search engines.

• Update frequently: Post content to your blog frequently so it does not go stagnant.

Try using these tips to improve your blog’s organic visibility within the search engines. Ultimately, they can help improve your website’s visibility as well.

Posted by: Nikki Johnson, Marketing Coordinator

As it turns out, we learned more from the recent swine flu scare than we thought. And not just that we needed to limit travel to Mexico or wash our hands more frequently. An article on WebProNews used the flu as an example of why we should be paying attention to the types of searches people are conducting on the Web.

According to the article, the website stats of a blog posting discussing the swine flu prove that people are now using more long-tailed search queries to find the information they need. In fact, the author claims that the days of focusing search engine optimization (SEO) efforts exclusively on short keyword phrases are gone. Search marketers should now target longer keyword phrases in order to try and capture exactly what someone is searching for. The top search phrase used by visitors to the particular swine flu posting was, “How do you know if you have swine flu?” Nine-word phrases like these are coined “money keywords” and are expected to bring in a targeted audience to your website.

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Posted by: Brooke Caesar, Account Manager

Building the keyword list is the backbone to any successful search engine marketing campaign. If you target keywords that are too competitive, you end up chasing dreams of grandeur. If you target keywords that are too niche, you’ll get the results, but not the traffic. There are many steps in finding the right balance that will get the results and the traffic.

Begin your strategy by brainstorming keywords that are central to your organization and your audience. Once you have compiled a complete list, move onto what your competitors find important. One of the keys to creating that successful keyword strategy involves investigating what is central to your competitors’ strategy.

Review their meta data
What keywords are they using? How are they enticing people to come to their site (call to action)? Go to the competitors’ site and view their code. Take a look at the keywords that they think are beneficial by looking at their title, description and keyword tags. read more »

Posted by: Sean Voorhies, Marketing Coordinator

Once you’ve set your keyword strategy, what do you do with all of those terms? Here’s your primer on putting keywords to work for website visibility.

Meta Data
Title, description and keyword tags (all part of your behind-the-scenes meta data) are valuable locations for keyword optimization. Place your most important keywords early in your tags rather than later. While each engine has different title and description character limits, it best to use the least common denominator to avoid having text cut off. Using the following guidelines for each tag can help make the most of your rankings across each engine: read more »

Posted by: Leslie Russell, Marketing Coordinator

Your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is in place, but what are the metrics to measure its success? Are people really finding your site through organic listings? Are you bringing in new qualified visitors? Are your keywords the right keywords to optimize for? The success of your SEO campaign can be assessed in many ways:

Keyword Rankings
When you began your SEO campaign, you determined a list of keywords to optimize for. Before optimizing, conduct some searches on the top three engines – Google, Yahoo! and MSN – to see what sites are coming up within the first page of results. Throughout the SEO campaign, perform spot checks manually, or utilize tools (some of which are subscriber-based), to determine if your site’s rankings have improved.  read more »