MORNING SESSION:  “How to Optimize Your Website”

1. Discover SEO competitive research techniques, tips and tools to use.

2. Learn the basics of SEO and the how the major search engines work.

3. Extensive SEO keyword research overview.

4. Learn how to optimize every page of your website including: Meta Tag, H1, Image Tag, Content Optimization, URL Structure,Internal Link Structure and much more!

6.See real examples and case studies of successful SEO programs.

AFTERNOON SESSION: “Link Building – Build Search Engine Trust & Increase Sales Through Your SEO Efforts”

1. Learn the basics of relevant SEO link building.

2. In depth discussion of how to conduct a link audit and how to develop your ongoing link building strategy that will build search engine and visitor trust.

3. Learn the basics of Social Media Marketing and how to tie your Social Media into your SEO.

4. Discover how to measure the ROI and success of your SEO efforts.

5. Personal 1 on 1, SEO audit of your website with the SEO workshop instructor, Nick Stamoulis.

Reserve your seat online at http://boston-internet-marketing.eventbrite.com/ or call 781-999-1222 today!

Clearly define and outline your services.
Let’s say your company offers “human capital services” as a B2B service. What does that even mean? Is that a term the decision makers and influencers you are trying to reach would understand? What about someone else (like an executive assistant) who is doing the research for that decision maker? Do they know what “human capital services” means? It’s important to use appropriate industry jargon (to demonstrate your expertise) but you don’t want to alienate potential customers because you fail to translate your content into laymen’s terms.

What subcategories fall under “human capital services?” Human resources? Employee training programs? Recruiting services? Don’t just assume your visitor knows what you mean. Even self-explanatory content should be explained a little. Give visitors YOUR definition and walk them through the process. The more information your potential customers have to work with, the more likely they are to convert. Information leads to trust; trust leads to conversion.

Show the business value of your services.
What’s In It For Me? –That is what visitors to your site are asking themselves. In order to convert visitors, your site has to clearly demonstrate how your business can help theirs. While it’s fine to pat yourself on the back on your “About Us” page, your service/product pages should focus on what you can do for the customer, not why your company is so cool. What real-world problems do your products/services address? How can your company make life better for your clients? If you want potential customers to convert you have to clearly outline why it’s worth their time and money to do so.

Make it easy for visitors to find what they need.
Website layout and navigation are so important for increasing your conversion rate. If visitors can’t easily and quickly navigate your site to find the exact information they need, they won’t bother to dig around for it. Can you take a content heavy page and break it into separate pages, each focusing on a single topic? Can you combine thin pages and consolidate relevant information? Develop a strong internal linking structure between deep pages and make it simple for visitors to move throughout your site.

Why is a cheap hosting company a danger to your website’s success?

No Customer Service

I had a client whose site went dark for nearly four days through no fault of their own. Considering their entire business model was built on online purchases, you can imagine the panicked call I got one morning. This client, against my advice, had decided to move their hosting over to a company in India because it was only going to cost them $50 a month, compared to the $200 they had been paying for a US-based company. It took days of unanswered emails, phone calls, customer service help request tickets and community forums before we were able to get a representative from the company to fix the issue.

Lost Business

Imagine how much money that site owner lost in those 4 days?! A lot more than the $150 he saved by switching to a cheap hosting company. As a business owner, I know that my website is one of the single most valuable marketing and branding tools I have. Even though my company’s sales cycle is much longer than an e-commerce site, I don’t even want to think about what going offline for four days would do! Can your business really afford to cease to exist when your cheap hosting company makes a mistake and your website goes dark? Isn’t the security in knowing your site is safe from viruses and hackers and won’t go offline worth the extra money?

SEO

Usability is so important for SEO and a cheap hosting company can completely ruin the user-experience of your site. What visitor wants to work their way through a myriad of dead links and 404 errors because you hosting company messaged up? A site that is routinely plagued with errors, dead links and a lot of bounced traffic isn’t going to do much to earn the trust of the search engines either. Cheap hosting companies often lack the security of more expensive, US based companies, leaving your site open to attacks and hackers. Do you want someone else gaining control of your website?

Since Ocean Marketing and Paul Chrisotoforo were under the scrutiny of the Internet once this exchange was made public, Reddit users decided to “look under the hood” of Ocean Marketing’s website and uncovered a big SEO red flag—plagiarized content. The only reason I heard about Paul Christoforo and Ocean Marketing was because a reader of the Search Engine Optimization Journal sent me this Reddit thread that hangs Ocean Marketing out to dry for stealing content to build practically every page of their website, including their business blog and “About Us” section. The reader noted that one of Ocean Marketing’s blog posts looked suspiciously similar to one I had written back in May.

Check out the two posts and see for yourself:

Search Engine Optimization Journal: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing?

Ocean Marketing Blog: Who is Handling Your Social Media Marketing?

I could understand two titles being the same, that’s not really a big deal. But even if you just skim the two articles you’ll see they are WORD FOR WORD copies of each other. Normally I regret including the date into the URL of my blog (it’s too long), but for once I’m glad it’s there so you can see that my post went live about a week before Ocean Strategy published their “version” of it. Plagiarizing content is probably one of the few hard and fast SEO rules that every website must NEVER break. Sooner or later someone is going to notice and your online reputation is going to suffer because of it.

If there is anything worse than stealing content and posting it as your own, it might be trying to usurp someone’s actual online identity in attempt to salvage your own reputation. Kotaku.com posted this really eye-opening story—they tried to contact a man named Brandon Leidel, whom they believed was the Director of Marketing for the Avenger Controller. They got a quick reply from Brandon, but the “From” address was cstrophic@hotmail.com, which they uncovered to be owned by Christoforo and NOT Leidel. The real Brandon Leidel eventually got wind of the situation and sent an email over to the folks at Kotaku saying, “I wasn’t going to chime in but since he is replying as me, I can’t resist. I personally can’t stand him.”

The people behind Google and Bing are exceptionally smart and they recognize that a lot of black hat SEO practitioners and site owners are always looking for ways to trick the search algorithm and artificially boost their own site’s position in the SERP. Some traditional link building tactics, like link exchanges, have effectively been outlawed by the search engines because too many sites tried to take advantage of them. That’s why Google now incorporates 200 ranking factors when creating the SERP, to prevent any one tactic from weighing too heavily in a site’s favor.

Traditional link building activities like online PR, blog commenting and article marketing are all very important components of an SEO campaign, but soon they may no longer be enough to rest the success of your website on. As 2012 unfolds, I believe social signals are going to become an even more important factor to the success of SEO. The Bing-Facebook integration in May was just the beginning of social and search merging. Google+ was the next step. What’s coming up?

The recent “freshness” update from Google also makes me believe that content marketing is going to become a key component of SEO in 2012. Since websites can’t reasonably be expected to update pages of their website every few weeks (what would be the point of changing something just to change it?), business blogging, guest blogging and article marketing are going to become major link and brand building activities.

The search engines like to see a diverse approach to link building and a strong link portfolio that has a lot different link sources. Relying too heavily on one traditional link building tactic could land your site in hot water should the search engines ever declare that tactic “black hat.” It also limits your potential because you aren’t actively taking advantage of every opportunity. By increasing the amount of content your brand is publishing, you are not only developing great sources of inbound links, but you are also creating fodder for your social networks. Every piece of content you create can be shared on a social networking site and, as I said before, those social signals are crucial.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the long-term SEO potential of Google+.

Just a few weeks ago, Google announced that Google+ and Gmail will become even more integrated, capitalizing on the millions of users that already have Gmail accounts but not a Google+ profile. When Google+ users open open an e-mail from someone who also uses Google+, they can see the most recent Google+ post from the sender right in Gmail. Google+ users can also add the sender to one of their Circles, without having to leave Gmail.  The new integration also lets users filter their e-mail by Circles and automatically updates contact information by syncing information senders have shared on their Google+ profile.

So what does this mean for your business and SEO?

Google is doing their best to make Google+ an obvious addition to their Gmail user’s daily lives. This means that millions of potential customers could soon be flocking to Google+. This makes the +1 button that (hopefully) you’ve incorporated into your blog that much more meaningful. If someone +1s or posts your content on Google+, their action is going to show up in their friend’s inbox. Not only are you getting a link from the reposted content (or the power of social signals from the +1) your brand is getting introduced to a wider audience. Your current social network has the power to bring your brand to everyone they know, just by being on Google+!

In addition to the Gmail integration, companies that have a Google+ Pages account are starting to see their pages ranking just below their actual website in Google’s SERP. Having a company Google+ page ranking well means an increase in your company’s online brand presence, which helps establish trust and drive traffic, especially for branded searches. Users can add your brand directly from the SERP to their Circles as well, essentially inviting you to contact them on Google+ and share your content.

Much of Google+’s success hinges on adaptation by the public. By incorporating brand pages into the SERPs and Google+ activity into Gmail, Google is hoping to capture a larger percentage of their regular user base and turn them into Google+ users.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

To watch more content marketing video lessons, check out the content marketing video lesson archive.

Who is your online audience?
This may seem like marketing 101—who is going to be buying from you? But creating an effective SEO campaign means taking it step farther than just identifying who your online audience is, you need to understand what they do online and what they expect from your brand. How to do use social networking? Are the searching on mobile devices like Smartphones and tablets? What industry blogs do they read? How comfortable are they with online shopping? In order to create a successful SEO campaign you have to know all of this and more about your online audience, otherwise your campaign will miss the mark and fail to connect with your target audience.

Who is your real competition?
Indentifying who is your real online competition is no easy task. First off, your top offline competitors might not be the biggest threats to your online success. It’s possible that an entire new segment of competitors exist online…and they’ve been there a lot longer than you have. I’ve worked with several large, enterprise clients in the past that dominated the offline market, but had next to no online presence. Sometimes smaller brands are more agile and can quickly adapt to changing technology and consumer behavior. It takes much more time (and a lot of red tape) to get the big offline companies to the same place.

Secondly, it’s important that you stay realistic when determining your online competition. If you’re a small women’s shoe store, there is no way you can compete with brands like DSW, Famous Footwear or Payless for national dominance. You need to determine who is your immediate competition, the show store across town, and focus on beating them in the online arena with your SEO campaign.

How will you measure success?
Every site owner has different goals for their website, what are yours? Your SEO campaign should be designed to help you achieve those goals and objectives. Are you looking to increase the amount of traffic to your website? Do you want to get more people to sign up for your newsletter or download a trial version of your product? Do you want to encourage visitors to your site to contact your via phone or email? Before you can effectively measure the success of your SEO campaign, you need to know what metrics you are going to use to do so.

1. Get the vanity URL.
Once you’ve gotten 25 Likes for your company page (which, depending on the size of your company, might be an easy internal task—just have all your employees Like your page to get the ball rolling) Facebook allows users to create a vanity URL for their brand page. This is an excellent chance to focus on branding and on SEO. Check out the Brick Marketing Facebook page’s URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brick-Marketing-SEO-and-SEM-Firm/14204584980. Notice how I put both the brand name and top keywords into it? This means Brick Marketing’s Facebook page can rank for branded as well as non-branded searches, increasing our overall online presence. The username cannot be changed, so choose it wisely.

Here are a few examples of how some other brands have customized their URLS:

• https://www.facebook.com/cocacola
• https://www.facebook.com/AppStore
• https://www.facebook.com/uclabruins
• https://www.facebook.com/dexter

2. Fill out the company information as completely as possible.
The more content you give the search spiders on your website, the more chances they have to index and pull your site for certain search phrases; the same holds true with Facebook. If your Facebook page can rank alongside your company website, that puts you one step closer to dominating the SERP. Write an optimized company biography, put your business’s full address (it helps with local SEO) and phone number, include pictures and videos and make sure you link to your main website and company blogs! You want to make it as easy as possible for people to connect with your brand; give them the information to do so.

3. Publish any and all content.
If you want people to interact with your Facebook page, you have to give them a reason to do so. Social signals are playing an increasingly important role in SEO, so getting your content published and shared on Facebook is a must-do. You can link your Facebook page to your company blog’s RSS feed so that every time a new post goes live, it is automatically published on your Facebook page as well. Publish snippets of your guest blogs to Facebook, post videos, link to online press releases and news articles featuring your business and so forth. The more content you can feed into your Facebook page the easier it is to connect with your social network. One update every couple of days will probably pass by unnoticed.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

To watch more content marketing video lessons, check out the content marketing video lesson archive.