10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
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You’ve got to know your SEO. A lot of people think that just writing quality articles and sharing their link with family and friends is going to get them the traffic that they need...
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Inbound marketing is the cutting-edge and highly effective marketing method used to generate leads and customers. By attracting visitors naturally through search engines, blog articles, and social media, inbound marketing allows you to appeal to potential customers.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
10 THINGS YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW TO IMPROVE YOUR SEO by Bob Ruffolo @bobruffolo Bob is an inbound marketing professional with over 10 years of experience in online marketing and strategy development. Bob has always been on the cutting edge regarding all aspects of online marketing, including: web development, search engine optimization, social media marketing, blogging, analytics, and much more. Since founding IMPACT in 2009, Bob oversaw the company through an accelerated growth period and developed a reputation as one of the top small business marketing agencies in Connecticut. Bob is best known for his dedication to developing creative inbound marketing campaigns that produce measurable results.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
WANT TO HAVE A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE? Then you’ve got to know your SEO. A lot of people who are new to website design and creation think that just writing quality articles and sharing their link with family and friends is going to get them the traffic that they need. While writing quality content for your site is certainly important, when it comes to SEO – also known as search engine optimization – there’s a lot more that goes into it. Search engine optimization will allow your website to jump ahead hundreds, if not thousands of pages in any search result in any search engine.
Having an effective SEO game plan will not only increase your page ranking, but it will also increase your leads and sales. If you’re tired of being on page 533 of the Google search engine results, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ll get you right on track so that you can make sure that your is getting the traffic it deserves! Share website this eBook: Impactbnd.com
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
CONTENTS Identify Your Goals and Understand Your Challenges.....................................................6 Discover the Right Keywords..........................................................................................7 Analyze Your Competitors...............................................................................................9 Power Your On-Page SEO.............................................................................................11 Content Creation...........................................................................................................12 Off-Page SEO................................................................................................................14 Local SEO.....................................................................................................................16 Analytics.......................................................................................................................19
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
INDENTIFY YOUR GOALS AND UNDERSTAND YOUR CHALLENGES When it comes to SEO, it’s important to first understand exactly what you want from your website and what sort of hurdles you may have to overcome. Think about your site: What are you trying to do with it? Are you trying to sell products or services? Is it a website to let people know all about your company? Is it a hobby blog that you aren’t really using to generate any sort of income? Next you need to familiarize yourself with the challenges that are ahead. As you can imagine, there are millions upon millions of websites out there on the World Wide Web, and adding yours to the mix is like throwing a grain of sand onto a beach. It’s important to take a look at the web as a whole, and then break it down into your niche. Think about: • What is your niche?
• What sort of websites can also be found in your niche topic? • Who are your competitors?
Once you get a good idea of just who and what you’re up against, then it’s time to start putting together a game plan. Many new web creators and designers who are new to SEO go ahead and try and “guess” what they’ll need to make their website a success.
Do not make this fatal mistake.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
DISCOVER THE RIGHT KEYWORDS If you aren’t familiar with keywords, we’ll give you a quick little lesson. The best way to look at keywords is to look at a certain set of words or phrases that help identify your website. So let’s say you have a cooking website. Your keywords may be “cooking”, “grill” , and “food”. All of these keywords are related to your site and help search engines, like Yahoo! and Google, identify just what your website is about and categorize it. If search engines know how to categorize your website, then they’ll be able to show it in relevant search results. But here’s the thing: you can’t just choose keywords that you think may or could or should work for you. You have to do your research and choose ones that will be best for your website. While there are a ton of keyword tools out there on the web, one of the best is the HubSpot Keyword Tool.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
The HubSpot Keyword Tool has a ton of great features that will really help your website, like: • The tool will allow you to quickly see just where your keywords rank, and it will
continue to rank those keywords over time. • It will keep track of your competitors’ rankings, and share data that will help you target your competitors’ keywords. • Identify which keyword tools should be attached to a visitor or leads’ specific actions on your site. • It will track your return of investment (ROI), something which is a MUST for anyone with an eTail or e-commerce site. Share this eBook:
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS Remember how we told you that you could analyze your competitors with the keyword tool? HubSpot also offers a “Competitor Tool” that will allow you to further analyze your competitors’ website or websites.
Knowing just who your competitors are is important for a lot of reasons: 1. Knowing what your competitors are doing will allow you to fine tune and tailor your
online marketing game so that you’ll always stay one step ahead. 2. If you like a particular strategy that they’re using, a competitor tool will allow you to take a good look at that strategy and then decide if it’s for you. If it is, then you can change it up ever so slightly so that it works to your advantage. 3. You can quickly and easily see just how well – or how poorly – you’re doing when compared to your competitors. The HubSpot Competitor Tool allows you to do all of these things. This tool allows you to track your competitors’ inbound links, traffic ranking, and search engine rank. You can see just what keywords your competitors have chosen, and see just how well you’re performing in comparison.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
POWER YOUR ON-PAGE SEO On-page SEO is a term used to describe the process of optimizing all of the content on your website to help improve its search engine rankings. SEO doesn’t always apply to only text; you can also optimize any images that you have, any links… basically any content that you upload to your site’s domain can be optimized for on-page SEO. Of course, just looking at your website isn’t really going to help you much when it comes to trying to analyze just how well your website’s SEO is. This is when yet another great tool from HubSpot can be used. HubSpot used to have a “Website Grader” tool which they released in 2006, but just a few short months ago they released an all new, all-encompassing analytical tool – the HubSpot Marketing Grader. This awesome tool will analyze each and every aspect of your online marketing in 30 seconds or less! Everything that it reviews will then receive a “Marketing Grade” between 1 (meaning bad) to 100 (meaning great!). Using this kind of a tool shouldn’t be a one-off occurrence either. Make sure that you regularly use all of your tools to ensure that your website is current and up to date, and is as optimized as possible. The marketing grader works as a sort of “funnel” in appearance. If anything needs improvement, then you’ll receive a link to a page that will give you further tips and ideas on how you can improve your website. The tool will also give you “warnings” about what you can do to help improve your current SEO.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
CONTENT CREATION As we said, the content that you produce on your website is definitely important. You want to make sure that you have quality stuff on there that will make people want to keep coming back for more. If you don’t have quality content, then it doesn’t matter how wonderful your SEO efforts are. People have to want to read what you have to say. Content doesn’t have to be just pages and pages of “stuff” that you throw up onto your website. One of the best ways to produce content on your site is to do so through a blog. Blogs are incredibly beneficial to any website for a number of reasons: • Blogs turn you into an expert. If you write great blog entries that are
knowledgeable and fair, people are going to keep coming back for your opinion and advice. Being an expert makes you trustworthy, something which is particularly important if you are planning to sell, sell, sell! • You suddenly have the ability to talk to your customers. People hate online shopping mostly because they can’t see the face of the person they’re buying from or talking to. With a blog, you let people into your world and they feel like they can really get to know you. • Blogging will give you new search engine visibility. Search engines LOVE blogs when it comes to searches. Most people prefer to write in blog-form since it gives them a chance to be a bit more personal and down to earth with their visitors and customers. Blogs are also a great gateway to your social media sites (yes, you need to have a social media account for your website!), and vice versa.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
But your content doesn’t have to stop at just blogs. Making offers is a great way to draw people to your website through both your blog and through your social media sites. Offers can be as simple as giving away a free and informative ebook, or you can have free giveaways. TIP: It’s always a great idea to share other “offers” that you may find. Let’s say you have an electronics website. If you find a smokin’ deal on an mp3 player, pass the message along to your readers! People love a deal, and advertising that deal on your social media sites and your blog is sure to increase your traffic.
So where does all of this content creation get you? It allows you to build up your links. Link building is incredibly important when it comes to SEO. Each link that you get is like a “vote” towards your website. The more “votes” your website has, the more credible and reliable a search engine views your site as. As such, search engines will place your website higher in their search results than websites with less or no link building. TIP: Use social media contacts, forum contacts, and other bloggers to help you build both your links and theirs!
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
OFF-PAGE SEO Now that we’ve discussed on-page SEO, let’s move on to off-page SEO. As you can probably deduce, as on-page SEO has to do with what you must do on your website in order to it, off-page SEO is all about doing things off or outside of your web site to help improve your website search engine ranking. The number one and most important thing that you can do for off-page SEO rankings is something that we already discussed – link building. The more links you have, the better your Google PageRank and page ranks in other search engines will be. Though you don’t have to be selective about the links that you get, there are some things about the links that will help rank you higher than others. You should look for links that: • Are relevant to your site or what you do • Do not link out to any low quality or off-
topic websites. • Bring in the “right type” of traffic that you’re looking for. • Are ranking well in search engines. • That have a lot of links from other relevant websites. Also be on the lookout for any links that have the “rel=nofollow” link, or any redirect links. These won’t be of any benefit to your link building endeavors.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
You should also keep the following “B-Listed” (also known as the worst!) link building practices in mind so that you’ll know exactly what you should avoid when trying to build links: • Don’t borrow links • Don’t beg for links
• Don’t barter for links • Don’t bribe for links • Don’t buy links
Buying links used to be a particularly common practice, but recently a lot of search engines have become quite wise to this method. Google, for instance, has this policy: “…some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the longterm impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.” So when it comes to any of the 5 B-Listed worst SEO practices, don’t do them. They will most likely only end up being a detriment to your website. Submitting your site or blog to different directories is also another good way to boost your rankings. Make sure you do your research first, and find which directories are worth submitting to. Also read the fine print and make sure that your submission is in compliance with the web directory’s rules.
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
LOCAL SEO Optimizing your business website for local keywords and targeting local visitors can be great ways of expanding your local business. However, if you are promoting a local business that is mainly dependent on local customers, then the success of your business basically depends on how many leads and sales you can generate from a specific area. Inbound marketing is a platform that does the work for you. Here are some ways that will explain how inbound marketing can be used to improve local SEO.
Optimization for local keywords If you are not a giant company operating business all across the country, then you are largely dependent on how many sales can be generated to local people. Inbound marketing strategies will help you out in getting more and more people to buy your products. For this, you will have to optimize your website for local people. There are certain geographically allocated keywords which may help you if you target them. For example, if you are selling a product in a certain town in a certain state, then the people living in that area will search for products with user specific keywords, such as “massage therapy in Lynchburg, Virginia.” In that case, if you target the keywords that have small competition and a lesser number of searches, you are then likely to top the list in a short time. In addition, when someone searches for a keyword in one state, the results that are shown will be different from that of another. There are some SEO techniques that can be implemented regarding this. Make Share this eBook:
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
sure that all page URLs are correctly formatted, your contents include geographically specific keywords, you use keywords in H1 tags and so on. Basically, you will be required to implement the SEO techniques precisely when you target local people to buy your products. SELeads.com states that 43% of the global searches are on local keywords.
Target local bloggers and readers Another very useful way of targeting local buyers is to target local blog sites and their visitors. If you do a little research on the most visited blogs and websites in your territory, you can find a huge list very easily. By engaging the bloggers to write about your product, you can become a successful brand overnight. This technique has proven time and time again to be incredibly effective at catching people’s attention. Write some blog articles describing your products and publish them to local blog websites. Ask the readers to test your product and leave feedback. In a word, engage local people to discuss your product.
Use city specific websites Apart from blogging sites, there are certain city specific websites that are very helpful for you to expand your local business. Whether you are from a small town or a large city, there are certain directory websites who have complete lists of companies who are operating businesses in your area. All you need is to ensure that these websites have your company listed.
Create accounts for review websites It is proven that people tend to trust what others review positively. You can use this trend for generating business. There are lots of review websites where people get the chance to leave their reviews. What you have to do is to open some accounts in review websites and ask the buyers to leave their reviews politely. If you find a certain review website has a lot of reviews for you, do not hesitate to highlight it on your website. Share this eBook:
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
Target local audiences through social media Social media is a great platform for inbound marketers. Start pages for your local business on different social media websites and advertise them so that local users like your page. For example, if you have a page on Facebook, use Facebook’s advertising options to maximize popularity. The biggest benefit is that using social media websites are either completely free or at least very minimal in cost. Hubspot. com reports that more than 50% of local businesses find that Facebook helps them. there are also other ways of targeting local buyers. Always make sure that they are more engaging and positive. If you have strict plans regarding this, it will not take long to turn your business from local to nationally recognized.
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ANALYTICS Now that you have all of the tools that you need, it’s important that you really spend the time to familiarize yourself with them and learn just how they can benefit your website. Don’t expect to learn the in’s and out’s of a tool right away. It’ll take time to not only learn how to navigate the tools, but to see just what stats are most vital to your website. They will also gather historical data that will help you make the best decisions for your website. TIP: There are several other analytical tools out there that can help your website, and a lot of them are absolutely free! Check some of them out and see which ones work best for you and your website.
These tools can potentially give you a bunch of important information, such as: • How your visitors found your site
• How many visitors you’ve had come to your site • Where your visitors came from
• Where your visitors went when they came to your site, and where they went after
leaving your site Analytical tools help you see just who your visitors are and what they’re doing so that you can help fine tune your marketing techniques and start converting those leads into real buyers, or repeat visitors. It will give you a good idea of what works and what doesn’t work for your website, as well as provide you with a ton of other insightful information. If you ever need any help with improving your website and your marketing scheme, you should strongly consider hiring an inbound marketing firm. While the cost upfront is more than a free analytical tool on the web, once you know how to use the tools and
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10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your SEO
what you need to analyze, that expense will quickly turn into an investment that will make you more money than you could ever imagine! Marketing firms are here to help you: • Increase your traffic
• Improve you content
• Effectively build up your SEO
• Attract new and return visitors
Ask about marketing automation to help you learn how to identify different types of buyers. Also, ask what sort of methods can be used on each type of buyer to guarantee sales and returning visitors. If you have a concern about price, remember this: inbound marketing is not an expense, but an investment in the long-term growth of your online marketing efforts. Not only will you make an impact based on appearance and professionalism, but the outlined program above ensures that you are presented as an expert in your industry. By providing powerful content in blog articles and offers, you will drive more traffic to your website. This plan also provides numerous ways for you to attract buyers at various levels of the buying cycle. This ensures that you generate enough leads to grow your business. Marketing automation helps identify buyers from your marketing efforts who are ready to commit quicker and easier than ever before. After all, can you really put a price on success and what it will feel like to know you’ve succeeded just by employing tried and true marketing efforts? The price of employing inbound marketing strategies is nothing compared to the rewards, and most of all, what have you got to lose? Your success is nothing to leave to chance.
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