Put Some Wind in your SEO Sails

The days of taking a cookie cutter approach to your SEO optimization are over. You need to be aggressive with everything you do now online so it is important to go above and beyond the typical cookie cutter approach when it comes to marketing your website online. You have to really test SEO efforts and [...]

The days of taking a cookie cutter approach to your SEO optimization are over. You need to be aggressive with everything you do now online so it is important to go above and beyond the typical cookie cutter approach when it comes to marketing your website online. You have to really test SEO efforts and try new things to see what might work better or worse. Every industry has a great deal of competition online so it is important to do everything you can to really stand out in your specific marketplace.

Try these efforts to help increase the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts:

Meta Tags: Meta tags are nothing new. You would not believe how many websites I come across where only 30 of the 60 recommended characters are being utilized. Out of those thirty a good portion is just a company name. There is a significant amount of room for improvement if only 30 are being used up. You want to maximize the 60 character limit for the meta tags and the 160 character limit for the meta tag descriptions. Don’t short change yourself by not maxing out these locations for keywords and useful text. Meta tags don’t create rankings but they do guide your website to the direction of the right audience so make sure you have a very strong emphasis on your meta information.

Profiles: Don’t just launch a business profile and walk away from it. Fill it with some nice raw data and information. You should have every field always filled in with something pertaining your business. That doesn’t mean to jam keywords into fields where it doesn’t pertain but fill in the information where it calls for it. Every piece of text within your business profiles is an opportunity for the search engine spiders to read so if you are going to spend the time to launch a variety of business profiles make it worth your time.

Social Tools: We all know that social media is a rather large beast and I am not going to sit here and tell you need to be a part of it but now that search engines are really starting to display rich snippets of social information in the search results it is important that if you are using the platforms you try to use keyword rich text to get your point across. Using filler text will not help your snippets reach search engine visibility if it should happen to make it into the search results.

SEO requires taking that extra step and really thinking about each and every move you are making in the search engines when marketing yourself or your business. Think outside the box and go that extra step and over time you will increase your potential to appear in search results.

Video Tips to Use by Gideon Shalwick

Gideon Shalwick goes over the importance of introducing some sort of online video marketing into the picture for any business looking to brand themselves in the online space. Years ago creating an online video was extremely difficult and expensive and scared many businesses away. The internet has come a long way since those days and [...]

Gideon Shalwick goes over the importance of introducing some sort of online video marketing into the picture for any business looking to brand themselves in the online space. Years ago creating an online video was extremely difficult and expensive and scared many businesses away. The internet has come a long way since those days and has really opened up the marketing landscape to allow people and businesses to brand themselves with online video marketing. Gideon made a good point stating that it does not have to be expensive to be done right. A little flip camera some inexpensive flood lights and basic video editing software and you all of a sudden can create a very professional looking video for your online business.

Check out the helpful video by Gideon Shalwick:

Making a video doesn’t have to break the bank and can be done relatively inexpensive. Many businesses in today’s marketplace can achieve a great deal of online marketing by trying to execute some of the activities, software editing and production themselves. Regular online marketing can significantly help strengthen a businesses online search engine optimization efforts and attempts over time.

Ride the Visitor Wave When it Happens

The SEO industry is still in its infancy stage whether you want to admit it or not. The search engines are very young and sites like Google are just starting to get things right in the sense of really understanding how to catalog and display search data for users. Some websites come and go in [...]

The SEO industry is still in its infancy stage whether you want to admit it or not. The search engines are very young and sites like Google are just starting to get things right in the sense of really understanding how to catalog and display search data for users. Some websites come and go in short burst of energy and some stick around for the long haul. The same goes with various marketing efforts.

It is important to never avoid a marketing effort simply because you think it will not stick around for long. I still hear people say that Twitter is short winded and it will only be here for just a few years. Even if it is shouldn’t you be there trying to scoop up new business while you can? Everything in life is evolving including the business world. The internet has created a fast moving platform for people to express themselves and to communicate on. Regardless of an efforts life cycle you should always be using it to market yourself. In today’s marketplace there is no time or room for denial. Websites and marketing efforts move in large sweeping motions so it is important to take advantage of any new or existing marketing effort you can incorporate into your business plan.

5 Years ago MySpace was the big dog in the industry. Now the numbers have been steadily declining for about the last 24 months while websites like Facebook and Twitter have seen explosive growth leaping frogging the competition almost overnight. During the height of the MySpace era lots of businesses made a great deal of money and grew their business marketing themselves in that specific online community. Now the demographic has really shifted away as they continue to lose more users but that doesn’t mean that MySpace should have been avoided all together. If nobody used it years ago many of those businesses would not have made the revenues they did if they chose to avoid it all together. The point is many online communication vehicles are always changing so it is important to hop on now than to regret later you didn’t even show up for the party.

Ten Stunningly Fresh WordPress Themes From November

You do not have to be able to design or code if you want to use WordPress, that’s the beauty of it. Anyone can grab a domain, get a theme and start blogging. If you want to separate your blogs theme from the other thousands that exist in a crowded niche, then paying a small amount for a premium WordPress theme can be a very rewarding for you in the long term.

Here are Ten Stunningly Fresh WordPress Themes From November 2009, enjoy!

You do not have to be able to design or code if you want to use WordPress, that’s the beauty of it. Anyone can grab a domain, get a theme and start blogging. If you want to separate your blogs theme from the other thousands that exist in a crowded niche, then paying a small amount for a premium WordPress theme can be a very rewarding for you in the long term.

Here are Ten Stunningly Fresh WordPress Themes From November 2009, enjoy!

Chromatique – $25

Information & Demo

Chromatique is a Premium WordPress Theme designed and hand coded from scratch, to meet the highest needs of a Business/Blog and Portfolio Site.

The theme is fully featured and loaded with lots of configurable options, which enable a high level of simplicity and usability.

Chromatique

Interfaces – $30

Information & Demo

This theme is a complete WordPress Theme, designed from the ground up with custom fields, functions. This theme is built to function first and foremost as a news/folio/business, then it can be used for just about any site that needs a beautiful layout.

Interfaces

Network WP – $30

Network WP is a WordPress template inspired by big TV network sites. It is packed full of features including featured slider, image resizing to fit in with the template, social bookmarking, threaded comments, breadcrumb, JQuery efftects, widget ready.

Information & Demo

Network-WP

DesignNews Community Template – $25

Community theme is an easy to use, configurable theme with features oriented on community blogs, where posts are published by multiple authors.

Information & Demo

DesignNews

Marketplace – $25

Marketplace is a both clean and stylish WordPress theme with the intent and focus on creating a community site for industry news, tutorials, etc. This theme includes many popular built in features seen in today’s industry leading community sites. This themes comes with 5 different color options to choose from.

If you’ve ever thought about starting a community based site, then this is your theme. Purchase today and be up and running in no time at all. Themes features include: Advertisement Slots, Tabbed Sidebar Navigation, Flickr Group Integration, Post Images, Clean Comments, Social Links, RSS For Posts and Comments, and many more.

Information & Demo

Marketplace

Headlines – $70 (Woo Themes subscription)

Headlines continues where our old magazine themes left off. It has tons of requested features like featured area, social bookmarks, author highlighting, flexible layout to name a few. It’s the perfect platform to launch your magazine or blog and reach out to the world!

Information & Demo

Headlines

Manilla – $25

Manilla is a 4 in 1 WordPress theme that was designed to be a simple to use platform for your personal portfolio, as well as, working blog. After getting your site setup your new homepage will be populated with the most recent projects from your work section and queried with an AJAX carousel.

Information & Demo 

Manilla

IMaxell – $30

This theme is a Portfolio and / or a Corporate template for companies, portfolios, webdesigners, eBooks sites, etc, to showcase your services and work. This theme comes with CU3ER a brand new 3D slidereasy to customize, IMaxell also has an added 2 more sliders for your customization, s3Slider and jQuery innerFade.

Information & Demo

iMaxell

The Furniture Shop – $45

Designed especially for online shops The Furniture Store features a plugin free localized ecommerce system, a membership area, creating and saving a wishlist, an informative customer service area, unique “Shop by…” widgets, lots of independent widget ready areas and sooo much more!

Information & Demo

The-Furniture-Store

London Creative – $30

London Creative + comes with fully working contact form, awesome slider for your featured images, nasty spinning slider buttons (never saw them anywhere else, so you can call it unique), 2 message buttons under the slider and PrettyPhoto plugin (better clone of Lightbox).

Information & Demo

London-creative

The Difference of SEO for an Adsense and Service Type of Site

Is there a difference between optimizing a site for earning money with AdSense (or an affiliate micro website), or another contextual advertising, site and optimizing a business site for selling a service? You might think the answer would be “no”, but in actuality there is a difference.
For AdSense, all you are really concerned about [...]

Is there a difference between optimizing a site for earning money with AdSense (or an affiliate micro website), or another contextual advertising, site and optimizing a business site for selling a service? You might think the answer would be “no”, but in actuality there is a difference.

For AdSense, all you are really concerned about is finding valuable keywords to target. You really want to focus your efforts on making your content optimized enough to attract search engine traffic – in other words, you want high search rankings – but you don’t really want it so good that people hang on every word your write. After all, if they’re reading your content then they are not clicking on ads.

That’s not to say that you just want people showing up and clicking ads and not reading what you have to say. You may want the traffic on your site, but you earn money when they click so if the content is too good then you won’t get any contextual ad clicks.

With a service business, you don’t want ads on your site at all. They will certainly distract from your message and give people an exit from your site. You want your content to be so great that your visitors will not want to leave. After all, you are trying to sell your services.

You are not so much concerned with the most valuable keywords when optimizing your site for a service business. You are concerned with the right keywords for your business. They could be completely different keywords than anyone else is targeting, making your business unique. Or they could be the same keywords every one is targeting so that you can establish your uniqueness in a crowded marketplace. Whatever it is, you have to target the right keywords for your business.

At the end of the day, optimization is optimization, but there is a big difference – a different strategy – in optimizing for a service business and optimizing for contextual advertising.

Seth Godin: Sliced Bread

Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers

Anthony Parinello: Your Price is Too High