You already know you need to have excellent search engine optimization in place for your business to do well! Perhaps you have put it on a backburner and now you want to kick it in gear. You may be a new business owner and you haven’t had the opportunity to let it work for you yet. While you are interested in getting results fast, you need to avoid SEO scams that can cost you.
Guaranteed Ranking in a Specific Period of Time
As you look around for search engine optimization providers, it may be enticing to look towards those that offer a guarantee for ranking. They may tell you they can get you to the first page in 30 days! There is no crystal ball out there and no way can they realistically make that happen for you if they are using legitimate practices.
While you do want to find a search engine optimization provider with proven results, if it sounds too good to be true, it really is. These entities often charge more too because they try to draw you in with that fast result turn around. Don’t waste your time or money because that time is going to pass. You will be disappointed with the outcome, even if you had some improvement.
Free Trials
When you feel like you can get SEO for free, you may really be listening. Avoid those free trials though as they are just to reel you in. Realistically, they aren’t going to offer you much for free. SEO takes time, dedication, and plenty of resources. That isn’t going to be offered for nothing. Many of these free trials barely touch the surface.
If you want any real assistance from the company, you will have to pay them for it. They use the free trial though to get you into their office. Then they start to tell you about all of the packages and offers they can extend to you.
Excessive Link Building
Talk with the search engine optimization provider you think about hiring. Learn about the methods they are going to incorporate to get your results. They should have a basket full of possibilities and creative elements. Then they should branch out and sprinkle those various elements all over to reach your target audience.
Avoid providers who dive in with excessive link building. In a matter of a week, they could have hundreds of links that go back to your website. However, this is going to be suspicious to the search engines and get red flagged. It also doesn’t mean where they place those links get you any closer to your niche market. You must reach them to drive traffic and boost sales.
Fast and Furious
In the early planning stages, you need to take it slow and easy. Talk to several search engine optimization providers to see what they offer. Compare offers, evaluate them, and compare pricing. You want the best overall value for your investment. Avoid providers that are driving at you 100 miles an hour. They are fast and furious to get you to sign up with them.
They often talk at a fast pace and they don’t care if you look confused. In fact, they use jargon to loosely explain things. This is intentional so that later on when you tell them something isn’t what it should b, they can use those loopholes to stay legal. They aren’t ethical in what they offer but they know how to stay out of legal trouble.
Claims of Insider Connections
You may be drawn in by someone says they can offer you search engine optimization for less and with great results. They may tell you they have insider connections and they can get you bumped in with various search engines without much effort. As enticing as that seems, it isn’t real and it isn’t going to materialise. They will take your money and you will get nothing.
Like the tree that falls in the forest but no-one can hear, if you aren’t found in search you don’t really exist. Search engine optimization matters, but it will only be truly successful as part of a wider digital strategy. So what you need is a clear understanding of search, social and content.
PAGE CONTENT
First, surprise surprise, is what you put on your website. Its copy and content. No tricks, no technical wizardry, just well written, informative copy on your subject with some great imagery and other visual content to back it up.
Your sector’s high ranking key phrases must be there. But they must be natural and relevant. Stuffing keywords into the copy is unhelpful and could get you penalised by Google.
BACKLINKS
The next is backlinks. People linking to pages on your website from their website, blog or media site. Google likes that.
But not just any old people. And not necessarily people relevant to your subject and who have a bit of clout. The jargon is ‘authoritative’.
To achieve this you need some, here we go again, great content on your site and a PR ability to get it in front shedloads of them. Google Penguin 4.0 looks for ‘quality’ links from the right media.
SOCIAL SIGNALS
Then we’ve got social media. Google really likes it if people share your website content on their social networks. It loves likes, comments, retweets, shares, repins, blog comments – all that stuff.
And if they come from ‘influential’ people and places they’re even more impressed.
So that’s another thing you need to be good at.
MOBILE FIRST
Google recently announced that they are moving to crawl the mobile version of your website not the desktop. With this change, Google will primarily index mobile content and use that to decide how to rank its results, regardless of whether you’re on desktop or mobile. There will no longer be any type of “mobile-friendly” adjustment done just for mobile users. Effectively, if you’re not mobile-friendly, that will have an impact even on how you appear for desktop searchers. So this is where your SEO efforts must be focussed
OPTIMISATION
Finally we’ve got the back-end of your website. The bit that no-one except Google really cares about. The bit you see on Google when you do a search. But it’s very important.
Whatever platform your site has been built on it will have the capability to be optimised for your key search phrases in the page titles, meta-descriptions, image titles etc. It’s simply a question of knowing what you’re doing.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
I’m Steve Downes, Digital Marketing Consultant, strategist, wordsmith, SEO practitioner and content creator. I’m also a Director of the Manchester International Festival,
Eternally curious and always learning. Lover of BIG ideas.
Have you ever run out of ideas about how to generate huge traffic to your site? This article highlights great tips for the purpose. So why don’t you read on?
Blogging
Yes, blogging is a good idea to promote traffic to your site. While you provide content in your niche on your blog, from time to time you can refer something reasonable to your site and provide that link to your site in your blog(s). Soon readers will direct themselves to your site and you will have considerable traffic.
Write a free eBook in your niche
Sending the free eBook to your subscribers in a newsletter.
You certainly have an email list, however, small or big. Send a valuable yet interesting up-to-date free eBook written in your niche to your subscribers. The end of the eBook should contain helpful links with content referring to your site, which helps to gain great traffic to your site.
Participating in Huge Giveaway Events
Giveaway Events are joint ventures (JV’s) on a large scale. You become a contributor to the JV event by providing your free product as a gift. Lots of contributors contribute their free gifts to the event. Their subscribers will have an eye for your product if it is well groomed and will subscribe. Your new subscribers will not only have the benefit of enjoying your free gift but will also visit the links leading to your site that you provide inside your gift.
Article Magic
Write relevant articles in your niche but do NOT provide any promotional content of your products or sites within the body of the article. Write on a suitable and valuable topic that is of good quality and is interesting to read as well. These articles do allow you to give promotional content within resource boxes of your article format. In here, provide short statements directing to links with helpful content (related to the article content) in your niche on your site(s).
Press Releases
Press Releases allow you to promote your published product, a book or eBook in most cases. So have a good quality book/eBook written down in your niche and get it published, providing all the information in the press release regarding publisher of your book/eBook, publish date, author, address etc including a short content about what the book/eBook is about and take the reader to visit links for the book/eBook for further information in addition to the little information you already provide in the press release. So you can see, in order for the reader to visit the links of your book/eBook, the press release should be written arousing interest and curiosity in the reader. Like before, while the book/eBook provides quality content in your niche, it should also contain links to valuable information on your site(s), which in turn, will take interested, hungry readers to your site(s), generating the traffic you need.
Do you have a new business and are looking for ways to get your brand established in the market place? Maybe you already have an established company and just looking for ways to promote your brand and expand your marketing efforts? One fun and creative way to get the word out is through the use of promotional products with your company’s logo on them.
Brand Recognition through Promotional Products
Harness the power of brand recognition. The best marketers know that brand recognition is the secret ingredient for a company’s long-term success. That success relies not on the latest fad, but on the careful cultivation of a brand your customers know and trust. The sky is the limit to the types of products you can promote with our company logo or brand. Examples include frisbees, t-shirts, pens, mugs, golf balls, calculators, umbrellas, thumb drives and more!
Online Company Store
You most likely already have a website for your company with details about your products, services, mission statement, etc. Many companies set up a separate online company store site just to sell and promote their logoed promotional products mostly to their employees but also to the public. This separate online company store will provide a solution to successfully managing your brand. You can then consolidate all of your marketing materials (brochures, leaflets, organizers, and so forth) to be a consistent representation of your brand.
Most business owners are too busy to worry about acquiring logo merchandise and all of the order processing involved. Go with a company that offers a turnkey solution and will take all of the headache out of this from product selection, processing your orders, fulfillment, tracking and reporting information.
Employee Recognition and Incentive Programs
Another benefit of getting an online company store to promote your brand is for employee recognition, employee incentives and employee rewards programs. Many companies reward their employees by giving them points or a budget to spend in the online company store. Employees feel appreciated when they get high quality logoed promotional products and getting those products out there in the public strengthens the overall company brand. So this marketing approach is a win-win for all!
Think outside the box when coming up with ways to both promote your brand and show employee recognition. You could set up a site and let employees spend a certain amount based on number of years of service. You could let them earn points based on reaching company goals which could be spent in the store or simply let them order promotional products as needed for company events, tradeshows, etc.
In summary, setting up an online company store with high quality logoed promotional products and a turnkey operation to deliver those products will help your company boost its overall brand recognition and ultimate success.