Happy September Bloggers!
It’s hard to believe that the summer of 2012 is finally coming to an end. But it’s also an exciting time of year to look forward to all the beautiful fall colors, apple picking, football season, and being able to wear that favorite snugly sweater again!
The Nowspeed team has had quite an amazing summer with lots of new social media clients coming on board, an awesome company summer outing at F1 Racing, lots and lots of thoughtful team meetings to enhance the Nowspeed workflow, and creative innovative lunches to add some spice to our everyday lives. More recently, we were able to take a sailing trip from Barden’s Boat Yard Inc. in Marion, MA. To view some amazing pictures of our exploration, click here.
Here are some marketing tips we’d like to share with you which we also posted on our @Nowspeed Twitter account:
- 20 Point Content Marketing Project Checklist via Heidi Cohen
- What are the Top 10 Facebook Pages? via Jeff Bullas
- For Conventions, TV Viewing Down, Social Media Up via Boston.com
- The Hidden Cost of Cheap SEO & Social Media Labor via Search Engine Land
- Your new waiter is a tablet via CNN Money
How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: SEO Reporting & Analytics
After you SEO optimize your website, you will want to know what parts of the program are working well and what still needs improvement. Furthermore, you’ll need a way to quantify the business impact of your SEO work.
To get a good understanding of the effectiveness of your SEO program, you’ll need to understand how your keyword visibility has changed over time, how much traffic that visibility is driving to the website, and what is happening to that traffic.
There are many tools that will give you data on keyword visibility. Tools such as Hubspot’s Marketing Grader, Keyword Spy or SEM Rush can quickly tell you how visible your keywords are. If you keep track of your results from month to month, you’ll be able to see the impact of your work on visibility over time.
Keyword visibility, of course, is only the first step in the process. What you really want to know is how your visibility is impacting traffic and leads or sales. To get this data you’ll need to use a website analytics program like Google Analytics. This tool will tell you how much traffic and how many goal conversions you get from each keyword. By tying your visibility to traffic to conversions, you can get a complete picture of the business impact of your SEO work. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”
When it comes to having an effective SEO plan, inbound links is a very important part of the search engine’s algorithm, which determines how your keywords will rank in the organic search results. Each link is essentially a vote for your site’s content. And the more votes your site has, the more popular you’ll be in search engine results.
It is very important, therefore, to get as many high quality inbound links pointing to the most important pages of your website as possible. When you build links, make sure that you use keyword seeded anchor text across multiple web sites to increase your inbound links. You can get links by signing up with directories, issuing press releases, getting partners to link to you, linking from your own microsites, posting on social media sites, etc. There is an almost limitless amount of ways for you to get links, but all of them take time and effort. As you build links, keep track of how Google views your link building progress through Google webmaster tools, to make sure you are focused on getting links that will make a difference.
Don’t forget to include internal links to your most important pages to help spiders easily identify which pages they should pay closer attention to. Visitors will also benefit from internal linking since you’ll be promoting related or more in-depth information on a given topic. Also don’t forget to optimize your anchor text on these internal links as well. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”
Fresh content is a very important factor in keyword visibility. If your site is updated frequently, the search engines will index it more frequently and it will help you get better keyword visibility. A regularly updated blog is an excellent way to provide fresh content. It can also be helpful to make small updates to your product or service pages each month. Press releases on your site are another easy way to make your content fresh.
As you add new content, make sure you use all of the same principles mentioned above to make sure that the new HTML page body copy as well as the tags and links are fully optimized. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”
How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: Analyzing your Website SEO
Once you’ve built keywords in to your website, you’ll want the search engines to index the content and update your website in their search engine rankings. Google has a very helpful tool called Google Webmaster Tools which allows you to see your website the way that the search engines do. It will help you identify broken links or other factors which may be preventing them from seeing all of your web pages.
You can also tell the search engines not to index certain content on your website if you don’t want them to see it. These may be landing pages or ads, which have duplicate content or may be pages you don’t want searchers to see. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”
Justin Barton
Tom McGovern
Trish Reske
Erin Foskett
Olivier Sartor
David DiMartino
Waseem Kawaf
Daniel Rodriguez
