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September 5, 2020 By Benjamin Porter Leave a Comment

4 Common SEO Mistakes

Spending time and money on digital engagement and online marketing is necessary for any business in the 21^st century. To help ensure that your money is being well-utilized, it is important that you at least have a basic understanding of how online content works and how you can ensure that your marketing efforts actually reach the right audience. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a powerful way to enhance your efforts. With that in mind, here are 4 of the most common mistakes to look out for in your SEO plan.

Keywords Over Content

Keywords are a very important part of your SEO strategy, but they are not the only consideration. Search algorithms have become much more advanced than they ever have been before, and just because a keyword appears often enough does not mean that the page will rank highly. Instead, these algorithms look for an overall theme to the page.

For example, a restaurant in New York shouldn’t just focus on the keyword “New York restaurant.” The pages should also contain phrases like: dining experience, eating out, expert chefs, best hamburger, etc. These words all lead the search engine to relate the page to a restaurant.

Focusing On Links

Link-building is important, but quality of content and quality of links are both more important. Put differently, if you have links coming in from poorly-designed and poorly-ranked websites, it is not going to help very much. Similarly, if people are linking to your sub-standard content, don’t expect it to help out very much.

Building Lots of Pages

Having more pages on your website can certainly be helpful, but if you do not pay attention to the quality of your content first, then you might just be wasting time. Notice a trend here? Quality of content always comes before anything else!

The truth is, building pages is helpful to increase ranking, but some pages are not even indexed, which means they do not affect your search position at all. If you can build plenty of quality pages, go ahead. If you’re just adding pages for SEO purposes, you may want to reconsider.

Using the “Computer Guy”

While your tech person may be quite skilled in a variety of technical aspects, online marketing is a completely different ballgame. It is essential that you understand there is a different approach required for proper digital engagement than for your other technical needs. With this in mind, it is important that you hire a professional SEO company rather than simply try to use someone in house.

If you can avoid these 4 major mistakes, you can be certain that you are better equipped to deal with the current SEO marketplace. This will ensure you a better ranking on search engines, and ultimately lead to more website traffic.

September 5, 2020 By Dawn Walnoha Leave a Comment

Why You Need to Avoid Guaranteed Placement Companies

There are few things as exciting as starting your own company, especially when various salespeople start calling to vie for your business. However, it is important to be discerning when choosing what services you will use to market your company, especially if you are looking to expand your marketing efforts and do not understand how online marketing works. As a general rule, the one type of company you want to avoid is the one offering guaranteed search placement.

The Placement Myth

Contrary to what the marketing rep might say, there is no foolproof way to quickly get a company to the top of a Google search. Many unscrupulous individuals use this strategy to get a business owner’s attention. They claim to be working for or with Google and offer to help get your company at the top of the search results. Of course, none of them can explain exactly how they would do this, but they sure charge a pretty penny for it.

When you receive these types of calls, it is important to remember that this is simply a myth. Google, and every other search engine, uses a specific algorithm to sort search results–there is no short cut to the top of the results. Instead, you must utilize the latest search engine optimization tactics, which takes time and understanding of how the algorithm works.

Building Custom Content

In reality, one of the most powerful ways to increase your search ranking is to create plenty of keyword-optimized, custom content. This content will get indexed by search engines and help improve the rank of your page. More importantly, quality content is more likely to get picked up by bloggers or other web owners and linked to their site. These incoming links will improve your page rank and help to boost your search engine position.

The simple truth (which most experts are afraid to admit) is that online marketing is not an exact science. There are measures that work, but it is not realistic to think you can determine how quickly or how effective they are going to be. That said, when you engage a true marketing professional you can be assured of more traffic to your site and more traffic that can be converted to leads. At the end of the day, that is what everyone is looking for.

April 1, 2019 By Dawn Walnoha Leave a Comment

Content is King: What Should This Really Mean to Your Business?

Content is King

Many business models that worked as recently as a decade ago are suddenly finding themselves struggling amidst the internet-based economy that we live in today. New business owners are realizing the importance of content marketing to get their brand out there, quickly surpassing those old businesses that refuse to change with the times. Whether it is through blog creation, newsletters, free reports, or any other variety of content, it is important that business owners today understand how to provide value to consumers as part of their marketing plan. [Read more…]

March 28, 2019 By Benjamin Porter Leave a Comment

Leadership or Marketing?

This is a ridiculous video (see below). And like many ridiculous videos, it’s now closing in on one million views. There’s a narrator who explains how this is a lesson in leadership. But I don’t agree. (more…)

February 24, 2019 By Benjamin Porter Leave a Comment

The Business of Two Party Control

In a recent LA Times Opinion section, Jonah Goldberg wrote an interesting piece about the decline of political power for the Democratic and Republican Parties. Mr. Goldberg points to the open primary system that, while allowing for greater public input, began a process of diluting “boss” control. I agree with his assessment but not entirely with his thoughts on the cause. I think the decline can be interpreted through the lens of a changing technological and cultural landscape – one with which entrepreneurs and creative leaders are quite familiar. (more…)

December 12, 2014 By Benjamin Porter Leave a Comment

Making SEO Work for You

Some of the biggest companies around spend millions of dollars in online marketing and digital engagement to ensure that their brands remain at the top. In many cases, this money is spent on paid advertising and expensive campaigns. Many smaller business owners wonder how they can ever keep up with this and hope to become competitive. In reality, the question they should be asking is not how to compete with these giants, but rather to separate themselves from these giants. Fortunately, SEO (search engine optimization) gives businesses the opportunity to do just that. (more…)

4 Common SEO Mistakes

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Keywords Over Content

Focusing On Links

Building Lots of Pages

Using the “Computer Guy”

Why You Need to Avoid Guaranteed Placement Companies

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The Placement Myth

Building Custom Content

Content is King: What Should This Really Mean to Your Business?

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Leadership or Marketing?

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The Business of Two Party Control

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Making SEO Work for You

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