Everybody and their mother now owns a blog. It’s a simple fact of living in the same age as Nintendo, Teletubbies, and web 2.0. Any leg up that your business might have received by simply owning a blog is now gone. You can’t just casually have a blog if you’re going to be using it for your business. You need to make sure that it is integrated directly into your website (and your general marketing strategy). Why is that? Two important reasons:

1) Seamless User Experience

Did you know that the average internet browser spends a whopping six seconds on a web page before they move on to another one? Every second of your visitor’s experience is a tooth ‘n’ nail fight for their attention. If your blog is hosted separately from your website on a third party service like Blogspot or Wordpress, your visitor needs to be directed away from your website when they visit your blog. This creates a functional interruption as they leave your webpage, thus taking your traffic away from your website, even if it is to your blog, because it is hosted on a third party service.

If your blog is hosted along with your website, but not custom themed to match your website design, it creates a visual interruption, and the sudden interruption in visual theme throughout the site could cause your visitors to reflexively leave your website (think about the sudden visual change that pop-up adds and on-site advertisements cause).

2) Search Engine Optimization

The content that you publish through your blog is the cornerstone of your website’s online marketing potential. Blogs are commonly used as an easy way to promote interactivity within a website and publish useful content to which other people on the internet will link. If your blog is hosted by a third party service and NOT integrated with your website, you are putting your online presence at a huge disadvantage. By integrating your blog into your website, your blog content will be living on the same server as the rest of your website files. This makes it easier for Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines to index your content and properly attribute all your hard won search engine traffic to your website.

By integrating your blog into your website, you take a simple online publishing tool and turn it into an invaluable online marketing hub through which you can grow your online presence and seamlessly promote interactivity with your business both on your website and throughout the world wide web.

You may not know it but you see the results of the META title and description tags every time you use a search engine.  The title and short description that is displayed on the Search Engine Results Page (or SERP) is actually taken directly from the META tags coded into your site.

META tags are a part of the underlying HTML code that makes up your website. They provide search engines with important information about your site such as page titles, descriptions, and keywords. Unfortunately, properly optimized META tags are often overlooked as many people are unsure of what benefit they provide.

The above example shows the Search Engine Result for the Google Translate page. Notice that they included a relevant description of the page in the title as well as a brief description of what the page offers.

The key with these META tags is to think of them as your billboard on the Search Engine Results Page. The META Title is the headline that grabs peoples attention and the META Description is the short summary that draws them in.

Here are a few tips for working with your own META title and META description tags:

META Title:

• Give each page a unique title
• Make sure the title is relevant to the content on the page
• For maximum compatibility with all search engine make sure your META title is no more than 65 characters
• Think of this as the heading to your “billboard” on the Search Engine Results Page. Try to make the title enticing to the searcher.

META Description:

• Give each page a unique description
• Make sure your META description is relevant to the page and is enticing to searchers
• For maximum compatibility with all search engine make sure your META title is no more than 155 characters
• Think of this as a short advertisement. Engage the searcher with action words.

Do the images on your website have alt tags?  If they do, are the alt tags something like abc123.jpg?  A very basic yet helpful search-friendly design practice is to include alt and title tags in each of your graphics to better describe what they are.  This tells visual impairment devices what those pictures are, and it tells search engines what they are. If the alt tag is “Austin event planning company” instead of “abc123.jpg”, your website is recognized as more relevant to its actual subject matter.

A creative and effective way for your business to help out non-profit organizations and charities is to use your company’s online resources.  Consider some of these ideas:

• If you don’t already have e-commerce features on your site, you can easily set up a pay pal account to accept online donations without having to purchase complex a shopping cart system.
• If your site currently incorporates e-commerce, add an option at check-out to include a donation into the purchase total.
• Use your social media outlets to share your support of your organization and let others know how they can help.
• Link your organization’s website to your own site and social networks to help out their SEO.
• Have an online contest.  For example, whenever your company’s facebook page reaches 1000 fans, you will donate $X to Organization X.

By using these and other tactics, you will not only be supporting a good cause, but you’ll be building your online presence and improving your site’s SEO in the process!

You need “link juice” to increase your site’s ranking in the SERPs.  Here are a few easy, free link building tactics that can be used by any business owner!

• Donate your services to a good cause or have an event that will draw media attention.  Remember to take lots of pictures and video for posting on social media outlets!
• Write expert articles for an industry newsletter as a guest writer or even become a regular columnist.
• Run a comprehensive search of mentions of your company on the web and if you are not linked, ask for one!
• If you’ve received sincere thanks and praise from a client, ask them to post a link to your site on their personal website or profile.
• Be sure you are linked in the directories of all chambers or business organizations you’re a member of.
• Exchange links with business partners and referral partners.  Make sure you are “fans” of one another.

Still racking your brain to come up with a quick way to build links to your website and increase your online exposure?  Fact: YouTube consistently ranks as a Top 5 Search Engine; last month alone it was used by 125.5 million Americans.

YouTube, like every search engine, uses its own algorithm and delivers unique results… video results.  To access the 125.5 million Americans using YouTube each month, you must have video content on the web.  This doesn’t have to be an elaborate short film by any means– it can be as simple as a slide show, webinar, or a quick infomercial.  If you want to get more creative with your search marketing strategy, try releasing a viral video!

You should use the same principle SEO tactics with YouTube that you would with more tradtional search engines.  When submitting content to YouTube, be sure to sign up for a director’s account.  This will give you more room to describe your business and you’ll also have the capability to put live links in video descriptions.  Video content is a great and relatively easy way to get top-ranking search results, so what are you waiting for?  Grab the video camera and GO!

Love it or hate it, social networking is an essential aspect of business in the 21st century.  Social networking not only keeps you informed with regards to what your customers and competition are up to, but it is also one of the easiest ways to enhance brand awareness and credibility… or hurt it.  Pay attention to these tips that will help business owners obtain all the advantages social networks have to offer, while avoiding the potential hazards.

• We have two ears and one mouth for a reason… be sure to do more “listening” through your social networks than you do “speaking.”
• Keep it fresh.  Be sure to always have new and interesting content to keep your online audience engaged.  Try creating a routine, i.e. three facebook wall posts, three tweets, and three blog articles per week.
• Continuously build your social network by adding fans, customers, colleagues, networking partners, and other industry professionals.
• Maintain the same level of professionalism online as you do offline.
• Get involved in forums and discussions; if you read a comment about your business, respond!  Take this unique opportunity to directly interact with your customers and see what they have to say!

The following are social networks you and your employees should be utilizing:

-Your company should have a facebook fan page and a twitter account that are updated every couple of days.

-Create a LinkedIn profile for your business and encourage your employees to set up accounts to network with one another and other professionals.

-Blog, Blog, Blog.  You are an expert in your industry, right?  Well, share your expertise with the rest of us!

-Upload infomercials, promotions, or viral videos to YouTube.

-Create a Wiki for your business.

-List your business in local reviews/guides/forums.

-Add “share” links and badges to your website.

There are literally countless ways to interact via social networks.  If you haven’t already hopped on the social networking bandwagon, it’s not too late… but hurry!  As always, if you find yourself overwhelmed and in need of professional help, the experts here at WEBii are always happy to assist!

If your company is serious about seeing significant ROI from their search marketing efforts, it’s a good idea to hire an outside firm. Oftentimes, tedious hours of link building and keyword research are assigned to the intern… the secretary will tweet to an audience of three followers once a week… and every once in a while, an article will be posted to the company blog.  Newsflash: This strategy will not get you anywhere.

It is unlikely that anyone around the office has the time or skill set to manage a successful SEM campaign.  Unless your company has hired a full time, in-house SEM expert, it is in your best interest to consider outsourcing at least some of these tasks.  Consider which aspects of your SEM campaign you wish to hand over to the experts: Search Engine Optimization? PPC? Social Media?  Most firms will offer a package deal that includes all these components.

Outsourcing your search engine marketing is one of the best investments your company can make.  It will end up saving you a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of headaches.  Ready to give it a shot?  Call one of our SEO specialists at WEBii and get started today!

Have You Heard?

After years of speculation, it’s official: Google’s Matt Cutts stated that Google’s indexing formula ignores the ‘keywords’ meta tag.  What does this mean?  The meta keywords tag does nothing for your position on Google.  However, they are still used by many other search engines and directories, so don’t be too hasty and delete them from your web pages.  As I have mentioned before, having some extra meta tags in your site code is not going to harm you, so it is not a “bad” idea to keep up with your meta keywords.

2009 is proving to be a turning point in the number of small business owners who have asked us about using audio and/or video media in their web sites.  But while awareness of these interactive mediums have grown, it isn’t always advisable to start plastering video and audio files all over your web site. Remember to go back to those standard marketing rules – who is your audience and what do they want?

How large are your files and how will they affect the performance of your site to those visitors? Do they have a fast enough Internet connection?  Will they likely be viewing your site at work when they might need to mute sound from playing?  Is the primary purpose of your web site to entertain, for brand recognition, or for making sales?  Will a video detract from another key call-to-action?

For many businesses, marketing with online videos and audio is a great tool, but it might be better served on a particular web page instead of your home page, or only on third party web sites like blogs, community forums, Google, and YouTube.  SEO and marketing consultants can often make recommendations in this area that are tailored to your campaign.  Ask WEBii about SEO Marketing Services.