One critical element of planning for a link building campaign or to do some competitive analysis is to find out how many incoming links you have to your (or a competitor’s) website and what those links are. There are a ton of great resources out there that help you do this. Here are three free ones that we have found to be very useful.
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3 Great Ways to Analyze Incoming Links to Your Site for SEO
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Top 3 SEO Tags that You Must Use to Rank
I often get asked questions like "If I only could do one thing on my
site to make it be better optimized for search engines, what would it
be?" Well, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is the 3 most
important tags that you need to address on your pages in order to be
properly indexed by search engines…1) The Title Tag
The title tag is the text that appears at the VERY top of a search window and it’s used when a page is bookmarked.
Since the title tag is not on the web page itself and many people pay it no attention this is a great place to use keywords that may look strange elsewhere. However, resist the urge to stuff too many key phrases in here. The more you use, the less weight they have, and you run the risk of looking spammy to Google, so choose wisely! Use our SEO Meta Tag Tool to make sure you don’t go overboard. Make sure that EVERY page on your website has a unique page title.
2) Header Tags
Header tags, similar to title tags, are what tell search engines what that page is about. The header tag that holds the most weight in a search engine’s eyes is H1 and there should only be one of them per page. There can be multiple H2, H3, H4, etc. tags per page, however. It is important that you really use the header tags and not just a font, div or span tag with a CSS class telling it to be big and bold. Search engines don’t look at CSS, so identifying a title as such in the code to search engines is critical. You can always use the H1 tag to style with CSS anyway. Again, every page should have a unique H1 tag.Here is what a header tag looks like when you view the page source in your browser:
3) Meta Description
The Meta description tag is completely hidden from people visiting your site, and it actually does not help your page rank any higher in search engines at all. So why is it number three in the list? While the meta tag doesn’t help a page appear in search engine results, it does determine WHAT shows up in search engine results. So put things in your meta description tag that would make someone want to click on your listing over your competitor right next to you. This is NOT the place to load up on key phrases and limit yourself to around one good sentence. Notice it will also show your title tag here as well.
There you have it, my top three tags for effective search engine optimization. Enjoy
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Improve Your Business Using Twitter and Facebook
One of the aspects of link building that we tackle for our clients is making sure that they are effectively using social media apps like Facebook and Twitter. These are the two really hot social media apps right now and not getting up to speed on these fabulous services can be a detriment to the success to your business. One of the things I hear a lot is "Those things will never impact my business" and I cringe a little, because the people usually saying that know very little about what these websites actually do. I’m not saying that these sites or any social media is going to double every business’s revenue every time, but it could…and it’s free to use, so why not at least give it a try? Once you know what these services are capable of, I’d be suprised if you don’t see the value in it for your company. Here is a basic description of what these services are and a few reasons why all business owners should be in the know regarding the two currently most popular social media sites out there.
Facebook for Business
Facebook is a website that lets you connect to friends by entering the high school and college you attended and finding other people that may have been in your class. You can also enter tons of other information about yourself like where you work, what church you attend, movies you like, etc. and that helps other people to find you and request to be a "friend" of yours. When you become a friend with someone, any updates they post on their account will show up to you when you log in, so you’ll see if they uploaded a new photo from their vacation in Tahiti or if they’ve posted a status update saying they are "on their way to an internet marketing workshop." There are also functions that allow you to post notes (which are similar to blogs), photos, videos, events and even other 3rd party applications that let you play games, rate movies, identify all of the places you’ve ever travelled to and much, much more. Every aspect is centered around other people following what you do on Facebook and commenting on it. For example, if you updated your status saying that you are a Twitter addict, one of your friends may reply and welcome you to the club 😉
One important aspect of Facebook is that you can create causes, groups, and more importantly "fan pages" for a company or organization that allows other people to become a your "fan." This is a good way to get more exposure for your business, share information about your company and interact on a more personal level with your clients or customers.
Twitter for Business
Twitter, in my opinion, is a very simple way for people to get a taste of how social media can affect your business. Twitter is, by definition, a "micro blog." That essentially means it is a way to share very short thoughts with other people. It could be a recommendation of a company, or movie, website or it could be a reply to a post that someone else has made (which is called a "ReTweet.") Blogging can be a very valuable way to build your online presence and establish your authority in your industry but many people are intimidated by the thought if writing a daily, or even weekly article. The great thing about Twitter is you are limited to 140 characters, so all rules of grammar (okay, maybe not ALL
) are thrown out the window in favor of brevity and it requires MUCH less of a time commitment.
One of the more powerful aspects of Twitter is that people can search for relevant tweets and find people. So if you "Tweet" about a new special that you are offering at your business, someone may be searching on Twitter and find your post and then decide to start following you. Just like becoming a friend of someone on Facebook, when you follow someone on Twitter, it means you will see their posts when you log in, so you can keep up with what they have to say, and they will then see your posts from that point on as well. This is very powerful for a business owner as you can follow other experts in your industry and grow your knowledge (not to mention more personally connect you with anyone in the world – even the President), but it also establishes you as an expert as well. The key thing to remember is to keep your personal posts to a minimum and try to remain focused on your industry, if you want to keep the attention of your followers. Chances are, they started following you to find out more about your industry expertise than what you had to eat for lunch 🙂 Read our article on Twitter for more information.
Great, Why Should I Care?
One interesting development of how people have responded to the increasing popularity of social media is they now check these sites when determining who they want to do business with. Having a Facebook fan page for your business with a ton of fans and positive reviews speaks a wealth about who you are and many people tend to trust this non-biased feedback over brand identity alone. So this means that you need to be careful to put your best foot forward when you post on any social media site, because they are public, afterall.
Be polite, be relevant and keep it short and sweet.
If you plan to use Twitter for a great deal of personal updates, great! BUT, create a separate account for you personally that is separate from your business account so you can create a distinction and allow people to follow what they are most interested in – you personally or you professionally.
Another thing to be wary of is that there are people out there that use these social media apps for sending junk or solicitations. So it is best to get email notifications when new people follow you or become your friend and check them out to make sure you approve their association with you. And if you don’t like what you see, simply block them.
In conclusion, these tools are only as good as you make them. If you do not use them, they won’t help you. But if you do use it, it’s important that you keep up with your friends or followers and make sure that you are protecting your brand and actively participating with them. There are a lot of ways to burn your time on the internet, and these two can definitely fit that bill, but as long as you use these with a purpose in mind, you can build your business. Also, you can’t keep up with every social media site out there effectively, so pick a few to stick with. These two mentioned in this article are good ones to start with, and if you are feeling particularly spunky, another good social media site to check out for your business is LinkedIn.
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2 Ways to Find Out if Links to Your Site Carry Value
There are two things to look for to see if a link TO your website from another website is sending you Pagerank value to boost your position in search engines. Both methods keep search engines from following that link. However, keep in mind that even though a link may not pass Pagerank, no link is a bad one (unless maybe it’s a link from an unscruptulus source), as it can still still drive a live person to your site. Most social media sites use one of these two methods, so they do not provide true links back to your site which improves your ranking in search engines (Links back to your site improve your ranking in search engines – Read more here), BUT there is still value because people can see the link and if they like what they see when they visit, they may elect to manually link to your site themselves or socially bookmark it which shares it with their friends and increases your exposure.
- NoFollow – View the source of the website you are on. If you use a
web browser that allows "View Selection Source", like Firefox, that
makes this easier. If you use Firefox, highlight the link back to your
site and right-click and select "View Selection Source." You’ll see
some HTML code, but you want to look for something that looks like:rel="nofollow"
This tag tells search engines to not follow that link, although people can still click on it.
- Redirects – Many sites will use redirects to avoid passing Pagerank
to your link. You can identify that by turning on the "Status" bar at
the bottom of your browser if not already on (Look in menu "View –>
Status Bar") and then hover your mouse over the link on the page
without clicking on it, look in that bottom status bar to see where the
link points to. If the site is redirecting, you’ll see something like:socialmediasite.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eyoursite%2Ecom
What this effectively does is links to themselves with a parameter
telling their site to then forward to your site. Again, search engines
will not see the redirect to you and instead just sees a link to the
site linking to you.
- NoFollow – View the source of the website you are on. If you use a
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Internet Advertising Dominates Traditional Means in Economic Downturn
Here we are a good way through 2009 and an interesting trend has emerged. Despite the national economic resession, studies are showing that online advertising has not decreased, unlike most other traditional advertising means such as television and radio ads, which have dropped by approximately 15%. Many attribute this stability in the internet marketing industry to the fact that most website advertisments are charged per-click rather than a blanket charge per month regardless of success, as is the case with other advertising avenues.
That means that advertisers aren’t spending money if potential customers are not clicking on their ads, and anyone that has run a TV or radio ad knows that there are times when it’s questionable whether your ad is getting noticed and if it’s worth the significant investment. Another advantage of online advertising is the wealth of statistics you get on clicks, amount of time someone spends on your site, what time of day the most clicks occur and more. That allows advertisers to make more educated decisions on how they run their online advertising campaign.
So if you’ve not already taken advantage of the wonderful advertising programs that Google, Facebook and other internet advertisers have to offer, it may be a good time to get in the know.
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Another Good Site to Syndicate Articles
3 Things to Look for When Syndicating Content
One of the best ways to market your website and get more traffic and links pointing to it is by writing great articles about your field and then syndicating them. We’re always on the lookout for good places to syndicate content. But there’s so many sites to choose from…how do you know where your time is being well spent? Read on to find out!
We recently ran across a site, Go Articles, that has a good page rank, allows links back to your website (and they don’t use nofollow tags) and is free to post to – the three main things you should look for in an online syndication site.
Page Rank
Google assigns a page rank from 0-10 on all pages on the internet. That score gives you an idea of how well linked that page is. Building your own page rank depends on you getting links from other sites that have a decent page rank, which you can find out by using the Google Toolbar for your browser.
Links
Although it is suspected that you do get some minimal boost to your site for be simply mentioned on another website, but actually getting a link from another site to yours is where the real value is. But, in addition to having a link from a site with a decent page rank, you want to make sure that the link to you does not use the rel="nofollow" tag. That tag basically tells Google not to follow it, therefore removing any "link juice" that you may get from that incoming link. To check a site to see if they use nofollow tags on their links view your page source in a web browser and wade through the jibbersh until you see something like:
What you don’t want to see is this:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.yoursite.com">This is a link</a>
If you do, don’t bother getting a link from there. It’s mostly a waste of your time and you could be spending it at sites with more link "bang for the buck." Read this post for more on link building.
Free
There are plenty of places to pay to syndicate articles or post press releases, but in our experience the paid ones are only marginally better than the free ones, so if you can find free ones that meet this three-rule criteria,they are a good place to start.
Also, don’t forget to check out an earlier post of ours about syndication that lists WAY more places to syndicate your content at! Note, every site in that list has not been checked for our above three-rule criteria, so use at your own risk!
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Page Progressive Now Offers Internet Marketing Writing
Page Progressive is now offering article and press release writing specifically geared towards drawing more traffic to your website. This is accomplished by writing interesting articles and press releases that include key search phrases that you want to build an association with your website and then syndicating that content on the internet in order to get as many incoming links as possible to your site.
“Well-written press releases and articles are one of the best ways to build quality links to your website,” says Daniel Trimpey, CEO of Page Progressive.
This new service adds to the list of several services available for small businesses in Raleigh, NC who want to use internet marketing to acheive better exposure for their company.
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For more details, you can contact Page Progressive online here or call at 919-374-3014.
) are thrown out the window in favor of brevity and it requires MUCH less of a time commitment.
