Archive for May, 2009

How To Optimize For Google – San Diego Edition

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

As everyone now knows, having top rankings on Google can literally make or break your business. However, so much has been written about optimization and there are so many SEO companies out there providing differing messages that the average consumer is now really confused about how to get their site to rank.

Below, I have listed the top 3 things you can do today to get on your way to better rankings. This article is purposed for San Diego businesses but could really be used for any business looking to rank in their local city.

  1. Keyword Strategy - keywords are the backbone of any good SEO program. However, finding the right keywords takes a good marketing foundation and a ton of keyword and competitve research. If you choose the wrong keywords, it will mean that your optimization is essentially a waste. Optimizing for “san diego hotel” for example, is way too broad and way too competitve a term. Optimizing instead for “san diego ca hotel” would provide much more targeted traffic that would be much easier to obtain than going the other route. Spend lots of time on keyword research, it is the most valuable thing you can do!      
  2. Title Tag- The title tag plays one of the most vital roles in your optimization effort. Placing your primary keywords at the start of the tag is best but remember to keep your tags short and sweet. Also be wary of adding any extra words to the tag so that you don’t end up watering down the weight of the words. Also, less is more – so do not try to optimize for more than 2-3 words per page but remember plurals are different words and are treated as such by the engines. Back to our example, the title tag should read “San Diego Ca Hotel, San Diego CA Hotels”. Anything else is extraneous. Finally, ensure that the tags are relevant to the content ony our page – this is crucial to improved rankings.
  3. Robots, XML Sitemap-  A robots.txt file is a place on your site where you can tell the robots what pages to crawl and what pages not to crawl. Most importantly, you have an opportunity to tell the robots to crawl your XL sitemap, thereby ensuring that all of the pages of your site can be indexed. if you want more information about robots files, go to http://www.robotstxt.org/.  An XML sitemap is also critical because it is here where YOU tell the engines how many pages you have in your site, what pages of your site are the most important, and how often to crawl them. Here you put the control in your hands, rather than the engines.There are a gazillion free tools out there that can help you create an XML sitemap but we like Vigos http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/.

Try these steps out first to see if you can make any traction with your SEO program. there are, of course, many other steps that need to be completed to ensure you rank but these steps should be a good starting point.

No Comments »

It’s May 2009, What Now?

Monday, May 11th, 2009

With a deepening recession and a swine flu pandemic upon the Nation, perhaps 2009 has not gone as planned for many of us. Because of the uncertainty out there, we felt that now is probably as good a point as any to reflect on the year that’s gone by to see if and how these events (and others) have played out against online marketing plans. Below I will review a list of some top Internet Marketing strategies to see how they are still stacking up this year.

  1. Search engine optimization- Still the number one requested service we offer, SEO can offer an alternative to highly-priced pay per clicks. Predictably, economic conditions (and plethora of information out there regarding how to optimize) have turned many companies in wanna be SEO’s. Impact: Our customers are now competing with many more people for the same real estate (first 10 spots) and SEO has now become ultra competitive.  For those websites that do not have  large budgets for link building and content development, SEO is now becoming “out of reach”. For clients that cannot compete with the big budgets, we suggest going after long-tail keywords that may not have as much traffic but are less competitive and may produce better conversion rates. 
  2. Pay per click marketing-  Again, like with SEO, there are a larger number of customers competing for the same real estate and costs are now going through the roof for many keywords across many Industries. Impact: We see many customers reducing budgets here rather than staying the course. Best practices with pay per click such as landing page testing and conversion optimization take additional budgets but  many times the conversion rate is not a matter of reducing your marketing spend but about being more effective with it.
  3. Social Media Marketing-  Since there often can be little to no cost to launch a SMM campaign, we see a lot of our clients jumping into SMM head-first. Impact: While social media can be great for many brands, many people do not know why they need a Facebook page and/or why they are “twittering”, for examples. As a result, many clients are not finding the success they are wanting with social media marketing. We suggest “listening” first to what customers are saying about your brand before diving in with a half-hearted strategy.

There are, of course, many more strategies that have been impacted in 2009. However, the overall trend seems to be about trying “less expensive” tactics and strategies versus being more effective with current spends. The rest of the year should be an interesting one, whether the economy bounces back or not. Our advice to you is to simply stay the course..!

No Comments »