Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Tue, Mar 09, 2010
It's important to know where you (your website) are, before you plan a great SEO or inbound marketing strategy. A great way to know your condition is to execute an accurate SEO analysis or SEO report.
There are many ways to secure an accurate SEO analysis and SEO report for little or even zero money. The important consideration before you hire or pay for an SEO or Inbound Marketing professional is to be sure the SEO analysis or SEO report is accurate and comprehensive.
Below is an example of an SEO Analysis and SEO report generated on my own web site. It has all the search engine report details that I believe are critical to get a clear picture of the condition of any web site. Please understand that this SEO analysis is quite long and contains a lot of detail. You may want to come back to this report a few times and absorb all of this SEO report data in segments.
Report for www.virtualsupportsystems.com
March 09, 2010 at 08:37 AM
The website www.virtualsupportsystems.com ranks 40,314 of the 2,159,542 websites that have been ranked so far.
A website grade of 98.1/100 for www.virtualsupportsystems.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 98.1% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
I. Create Content
This SEO analysis and SEO report shows that every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it's optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do "ok" and contribute to the cause, so it's both a quality and a quantity game.
A. Blog Analysis
Blogging is a great way to reach your target audience with your thoughts, opinions, and offerings on relevant topics and should be part of each SEO analysis and SEO report.
Blog Found
Blog URL: http://www.virtualsupportsystems.com/our-blog/ (Last Post: March 05, 2010)
B. Blog Grade : 15.27
Your Blog Grade of 15.27 is based on a measurement of the traffic levels to your blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.
C. Recent Blog Articles
Targeted Website Traffic (con't)
Targeted Website Traffic
Marketing Revolution & Online Marketing Strategy
D. Google Indexed Pages : 144
This SEO report shows approximate number of pages on www.virtualsupportsystems.com that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content for its index. Generally, the more pages your site has within the Google cache, the better.
E. Readability Level : College Undergraduate
This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.
II. Optimize
Optimizing that content is a key step, however, to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web. In essence, this SEO analysis section is about maximizing your ROC - return on content.
A. Metadata
Metadata tags allow you to tell the search engines what your web page is about.
Page Title: Inbound Marketing & Inbound Marketing Consultants
Meta Description: Inbound Marketing Information & Search Engine Optimization consulting firm specializing in SEO, Social Media, Blog Management and Lead Generation and Development
Font Tags Found in HTML: We found some HTML <font> font tags on this page. While this is not a critical issue, you should use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate your website's content from its appearance.
B. Heading Summary
Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. This SEO analysis and SEO report shows that tags not only help human readers read the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help signal to the search engines, what the web page is about.
Total headings found: 10. See details.
Heading Type
Text
First-Level (H1): Inbound Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
Third-Level (H3): Certifed Inbound Marketing Consultants
Third-Level (H3): Inbound Marketing Consulting Client
Third-Level (H3): Free Inbound Marketing Analysis
Second-Level (H2): Inbound Marketing Consulting Application
Second-Level (H2): Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Second-Level (H2): Social Media Optimization
Second-Level (H2): Blog Development
Second-Level (H2): SEO Lead Generation Software
Second-Level (H2): Other Services:
C. Image Summary
Images are a great way to enhance a website from a user's perspective. However, it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot really "see" images. So, if you have lots of images that contain textual content within the image itself, this content will not be seen by the crawlers. Make sure all SEO analysis and SEO reports provide this information.
HTML helps address this issue by providing a way to specify the textual content for an image using the "alt" attribute. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the "alternative" content for images for those that cannot view the images themselves. This can be search engine crawlers or text-only web browsers.
Total images found: 13 , 2 image(s) don't have ALT text.
Too Many Images Found.
Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 13 images.
It's usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.
D. Interior Page Analysis : 3 Pages Processed
This SEO analysis and SEO report looked at a few other pages on this website to see how well they are optimized. This sort of interior page analysis can reveal exciting opportunities for you to target specific keywords or visitors. You can then create landing pages optimized towards converting those visitors into customers.
Page Titles & Description:
About Search Engine Optimization | Best Website Marketing
Learn about search engine optimization and best website marketing practices.
Search Engine Marketing Blog | Inbound Marketing Blog
Search engine marketing blog offering insight into the new Inbound Marketing explosion, SEO, PPC ...
Lead Generation Software | Marketing Software | Search Engine Optimization Software
Lead generation software & search engine optimization software makes your SEO and complete inboun...
E. Domain Info
Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain "stability" when looking at your pages.
Domain Age
8 years, 7 months, 2 days
Time To Expiration
2 years, 4 months, 29 days
This domain is registered for more than one year.
Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a commitment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website is not a temporary spam site.
F. MOZ Rank : 5
MozRank is SEOmoz's general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority or popularity. and is very similar in purpose to the measures of link importance used by the search engines (e.g., GOOGLE's PageRank).
G. Last Google Crawl Date : March 05, 2010 @ 12:31 PM (GMT)
Google will periodically crawl websites looking for new and updated content. In general, you want Google to crawl your site as often as possible, so your new content shows up in Google search results immediately.
H. Inbound Links : 229
One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. Having links to your website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps you rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content.
J. Yahoo! Directory : No Entry Found
virtualsupportsystems is not listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the DMOZ Open Directory Project in size. We recommend that every business have a listing in the Yahoo! Directory.
III. Promote
Now that you are producing remarkable content and optimizing it for search engines and other channels, you are ready to start promoting your content.
A. del.icio.us bookmarks : 2
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. Users can save links they wish to keep for later reference on the site, and pages that have been saved many times are displayed in a special "hot" section which can drive thousands of visits.
B. Link Tweet Summary
TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweets and retweets help drive traffic to the content that you have created.
Could not find tweets referring to your site via TweetMeme. Quick, go create some interesting content that will get people talking!
C. Twitter Grade : 59.89
We found the account @semseo1 tied to your website, below is our Twitter Grader analysis of the influence and usefulness of that account for your marketing efforts.
@semseo1
Followers 30
Following 42
Updates 20
IV. Convert
Getting found sure is fun. You're writing articles and producing videos (creating remarkable content), you're an SEO ninja by now (Optimize), and you're using all the social media sites and running email and ppc campaigns (Promote). At the end of the day, however, we aren't in this for fun. We're also not in this for traffic. The goal is quality sales leads and customers, so let's focus now on converting as much of your traffic as possible to leads and customers.
A. RSS Feed : Found
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way to easily deliver content to visitors after they've left your website but they're still interested in your subject. RSS is commonly used with blogs, news feeds, and other formatted news or other sources of information.
An RSS feed was detected in this web page. The feed link was correctly setup so that it can be auto-detected by feed readers and contemporary browsers. The feed URL for this site is http://www.virtualsupportsystems.com/CMS/UI/Mod....
B. Conversion Form : Found
Conversion forms are the primary way to get leads from your website. Collect contact information from your visitors so that you can follow up with them later and be in touch. Without forms, you can't convert your website traffic into customers.
We found at least one web form on your website.
V. Analyze
Check out how you compare to other similar websites. You need to monitor your traffic rank as well and see if your optimizations and new content are showing benefits. You will be able to draw conclusions from your competitors and other sites that are related to your business.
A. Traffic Rank : Top 3.362 %
Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings.
Your website has an Alexa rank of 1,045,553 which is in the top 3.362 % of all websites.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Fri, Mar 05, 2010
Targeted Website Traffic (con't)
This blog post is a continuation from our post of yesterday (March 4th, 2010). so please start there if you haven't read part 1...
So, we took the time to talk and I explained to him these fantastic changes from a 40 year concentration on Outbound Marketing to the newer, more effective Inbound Marketing solution. We continued our discussion about the magnitude of this shift from interrupting people and businesses with your message to making sure the message is available when his prospects are in need and actively searching. I also explained all the different ways they are searching and how people can be "talking" about him, his company and his products. He obviously new something about SEO but really didn't realize the other elements of Inbound Marketing such as:
- Accurate keyword analysis
- How to created targeted website traffic
- How important active blog development can really be
- The impact of his message through social media channels
- Lead generation
- Lead tracking
- Lead nurturing
- ROI analysis and evaluations
- Mostly how powerful content development makes the biggest difference
We basically came to the conclusion that he need to do much more and the answers we arrived at 8 months earlier don't apply in the same way as they do today. I was able to teach Kevin that he needed to be much more comprehensive. I told him that this doesn't mean he has to spend gobs more money. He just needed to understand the philosophy and methods needed to reach his target markets have changed and this means, he has to change. The fact is that all business owners and professionals need to make these same changes. They need to be involved in the creation of the content needed to meet the needs of their "potential" targeted website traffic.
What my client taught me? Kevin taught me that it is the client's knowledge and experience that needs to be exploited and will best determine the most fruitful target market both sort term and long term. This may seem like common sense to most but I see it overlooked a little too much when developing targeted website traffic, Inbound Marketing and even more so with a specific search engine optimization plans. Kevin brought up the question of shifting focus from the national market to targeting his local markets more for a number of reasons. One was that a few of his new clients that did find him from his SEO project were local. From there, Kevin then thought about this further and came to the conclusion that perhaps his targeted website traffic would be more prone to hire local design companies.
No matter if Kevin is right or wrong, the point should be considered by all companies getting involved with the new Inbound marketing and that point is to be very clear about your target markets segmentation. The more a business can segment the different target markets that would be interested in those products or services, the better (and more quickly) the Inbound marketing project can gain traction and accelerate the pace of the website's out reach. Lower hanging fruit can be identified, further defined and targeted with the appropriate message(s) using the appropriate technologies.
There is no doubt in my mind that the result from this elementary conversation will be huge. Why?
- Targeting the local market will remove 90% of Internet competition.
- The more targeted keywords will gain search engine positions faster.
- His local prospects will find him easier & faster.
- His message will be more focused in this target market (effective).
Conclusion: Carefully examine all your market segments and with the help of your Inbound Marketing Consultant either before you launch your comprehensive Internet marketing plan or before you continue your plan. Some times the basics can be overlooked an in this case, the client had the best solution for his marketing challenges.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Thu, Mar 04, 2010
Targeted Website Traffic
Do you have an advantage you are not seeing? Do you understand all you can about your targeted web site traffic? More to the point, your potential targeted website traffic.
I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a client. Normally, no matter who I am speaking with, my goal is to educate and teach as much as possible about the new age of Inbound Marketing and achieving targeted web site traffic. It's something I am passionate about and very committed too. But, yesterday, my client taught me or maybe simply reminded me about an extremely important element of search marketing that needs attention BEFORE actual website efforts are initiated.
Client: Peartree Graphic Design
Client Length: Approximately 1 year
Client Services: Logo creation, graphic design, web design, brochure and other advertising material creations.
Client History: We were hired by this client about 8 months ago to create and develop a 15 keyword search engine optimization campaign for a 6 month period. This project ended some time in December 2009 with mixed but admittedly limited results. Although the client did achieve a return on his investment, some search engine positions and increased overall activity, we both agreed more work needs to be applied to achieve our initial objectives.
His first question when we spoke yesterday was: Why haven't we achieved the results we anticipate when we originally spoke back in May of 2009? My answer was as follows:
I explained to Kevin (Peartree Graphic Design) that SEO (search engine optimization) has changed or evolved dramatically in the last year. I explained that from my perspective, marketing itself has changed significantly in the past 12 months. Maybe more so than at any time in recent history. Then I went on to explain that these changes are so significant and so important that we need to discuss this in length, and so we did.
Kevin talked about the fact that he has been very busy lately with multiple deadlines and hasn't really had time to lift his head for air and look around to study what is happening with his own site, the marketing of his site. Obviously my client doesn't see these massive changes in the marketing industry and I can't realistically expect him too monitor and evaluate:
Kevin isn't a marketing professional, he has his own graphic design business to look after, clients to support, projects to oversee and oh yeah, he has a personal life too (I hope). With all this considered, what is the best course of action?
Our continued conversation and conclusions will be detailed on my next blog article tomorrow Friday, March 5th. Stay tuned, it's interesting!
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Tue, Mar 02, 2010
The Marketing Revolution & Your Online Marketing Strategy
One of my primary objectives as an inbound marketing consultant is to inform and educate clients and others, that we really are in the midst of a serious marketing revolution.
Although I will explain this in more detail, my message is simple:
Those business owners that don't recognize these many significant changes and react accordingly, will be passed by those that do. Changes like these simply can't be ignored or even placed on the shoulders of another. This particular marketing revolution calls for company leaders to be more involved in the new online marketing strategy process.The art and science of lead generation is evolving quickly.
As a business owner, business professional or company leader, you have something (hopefully many things) to say to your clients and target markets. As a business owner, business professional or company leader, your clients and target market actually want to hear what you have to say. They want a different relationship with your organization. It is no longer enough to place this responsibility on your advertising or outbound marketing agency alone. As a leader, you must be involved with your online marketing strategy and B2B lead generation.
Your target market(s) are tired and even turned off by "interruption" marketing and are offering open ears and real loyalty to those organizations who have something to say and offer when they are asked. "When they are asked"? What does that mean?
It means this marketing revolution allows you to place your powerful message in front of your target market when they are actively searching (asking), as oppose to jamming it in front of them at the time of your choosing. More and more businesses and consumers are becoming very skilled at filtering out outbound marketing messages. There are 2 important points here:
- The significant money being spent on outbound marketing messages are less effective and therefore, more costly.
- This marketing revolution is providing opportunity for those companies with less or lower marketing budgets to create a competitive presence.
Doing things the old outbound way or utilizing traditional marketing methods will always have it's place and in many cases will provide a return on investment. However, there is more power being shifted with those that are paying attention and embracing the new age of inbound marketing (Internet marketing) and they are being rewarded. If you are considering getting involved with this marketing revolution and creating a better online marketing strategy, I encourage you to keep moving forward. Why?
- Search engine and a good online marketing strategy now offers the #1 return on investment when compared to ALL other marketing mediums.
- Consumers now use search engines more than any other resource to research, consider and select their goods and services.
Statistics don't lie. We are in the midst of a marketing revolution and your online marketing strategy is more important than ever. It represents more opportunity than ever.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Sat, Feb 27, 2010
The best search marketing must be complete search marketing.
To be clear, as a search marketing professional, my experience tells me that the more complete a search marketing strategy and plan is, the more effective it will be. Maybe that is nothing more than common sense to some but others don't seem to be clear about the various elements that are available when creating a comprehensive search marketing project.
Use the search marketing checklist below as a basic road map for your search marketing project. The more of these components you have included in your plan, the better. Remember though, don't just include them, pay them attention and develop them consistently.
Best Search Marketing Checklist:
- Compelling content: Make sure you offer the visitor what they were searching for in the first place. This helps your efforts from both the visitor and the search engine's perspective.
- Blog: This is critical for developing your timely content, attracting links and increasing the total number of pages on your web site.
- # of Indexed Pages: Pay attention to the number of your web site's pages that are indexed by Google. The more, the better.
- Readability Level: Make sure your writing and the content is developed for your target market and not too difficult to understand or too elementary.
- Meta Tags: Make sure all the HTML tags on each of your web pages have been optimized for the relevant keywords or keyphrases. These include title tags, description tags, header tags, image tags and keyword tags at a minimum.
- Domain name renewal term: Make sure your domain name is renewed for more than 2 years into the future. The search engine see this as a component of stability.
- Domain name redirect: Make sure you have a permanent redirect for the http://domainname.com portion of your sita as search engine may see this and the www.domainname.com as two separate web sites.
- Inbound links: The more links from other web site's that point to your web site the better. One way links are your goal as reciprocal links don't carry weight anymore. You also want links from related web site's with good traffic.
- Directory listings: Secure as many free and certain paid directory listings as you can. Ex. Yahoo Directory
- Linked In account: Especially if your products or services are business to business related, this is a good social media web site to connect and promote.
- Twitter account
- Facebook or Facebook Fan Page
- Utilize del.ico.us bookmarketing
- RSS feed: Make sure you make it easy for others to receive your developing content
- Landing pages: Be sure to have your web site configured to provide targeted information to targeted markets and keywords.
- Conversion forms: Make sure you have conversion forms in place to convert traffic to leads.
- Lead generation software
- Lead tracking software
- Lead nurturing software
- Comprehensive search marketing software: Manage all of these and other elements of your search marketing plan with a complete software application.
These elements have much more detail than what I have listed in this best search marketing checklist. My recommendation is to use the advice of a search marketing professional coupled with search marketing software. There are other components of a comprehensive search marketing strategy but this best search marketing checklist is a great place to start the analysis of your project.
Free Search Marketing Analysis
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Wed, Feb 24, 2010
What is search engine marketing software and how can I benefit?
Search engine marketing software can come in many forms, formats and price tags. For most web site project managers or web site owners, search engine marketing software is a collective menu of separate and independent applications developed to handle a single element of the search engine marketing process. For example, here are some general terms and descriptions of search engine marketing software used today:
- CMS (content management system) like Word Press or Joomla for web page management and development.
- Blogger.com is blog Development software used to create, manage and develop your blog activities.
- Wordtracker to research and build your master keyword database.
- Web Position for certain analytics and reporting and other SEO activities
- Google analytics to help analyze traffic
- Twitteriffic to help post tweets
- Many others...
All of these applications (search engine marketing software) can help a web site owner get found, promote, convert and report on the productivity of a search engine marketing campaign.
In 2010, efficiency goes hand in hand with effectiveness. What do I mean? Other than the obvious reasons, any business or web site owner trying to harness the increasing power of inbound marketing (Internet marketing) needs to understand how fast thing have been changing and will continue to change in the world of search engine marketing and search engine marketing software. This is why finding a more complete suite of search engine optimization or search engine marketing software is becoming more critical.
Think about just some of the components that a good search engine marketing software package can address and help manage:
- Keyword research and evaluation - usage, competition and difficulty
- Web page development - design and presentation
- Web page optimization - configuring title, description, keyword, header and image tags
- Blog management - creating new article posts
- Social media optimization - updating status and message out reach
- Lead Generation -internal software that configures lead generation
- Lead tracking - lead management
- Lead Nurturing - communicate and nurture leads through sales cycles
- Linking strategies - developing inbound links from other web sites
- Content development - expanding, advancing and managing your growing content.
- Evaluation - specific measurement of all inbound marketing strategies
- Reporting - creating real time data as needed for critical decisions
Even if you find this partial list of search engine marketing elements daunting, not to mention the underlying complexities and detail that make up each element, it ultimately can make the difference between Internet success or failure. Comprehensive search engine marketing software can equate to a much higher degree of efficiency and effectiveness. This is easy to see when you understand that:
Inbound marketing now delivers the #1 ROI (return on investment) when compared to all other marketing mediums.
- Inbound marketing now delivers the #1 ROI (return on investment) when compared to all other marketing mediums.
- Search engines are now the #1 resource used by consumers to find goods and services.
This issue reflects the fast moving world of inbound marketing. Many businesses can now see (in one form or another) that inbound marketing and it's related components are becoming more effective and more affordable than the 40 year old methods of outbound or "interruption" marketing. It's as if a light is slowly getting brighter in a dark room and we are all scrambling to gain internal control so we can take advantage of this marketing revolution.
Whether you hire an SEO professional, employ your own team or even do some of these tasks yourself, a comprehensive search engine marketing software package will make the job easier, more productive and ultimately could be the difference between Internet explosion or a complete business implosion.
Securing the right search engine marketing software and being able to manage all the details of search engine optimization, search engine marketing or inbound marketing should be on the top of every web site owner's to-do list.
Free Search Engine Marketing Report
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Mon, Feb 22, 2010
In my industry (inbound marketing), the term search engine optimization is getting very over used and perhaps even a little boring. But, that doesn't change the fact that it is still an extremely important component of successful Internet (inbound) marketing. The easier you can make it for the major search engines to find a given web site, the better. If you're trying to build a steady and increasing traffic flow, better position on the major search engines can only help the cause.
Search engine optimization explained: As I have explained in some previous blog posts, search engine optimization is the process used to make a web page "search engine friendly". This process has many elements but they all (usually) breakdown into 2 areas:
- On Page Optimization
- Off Page Optimization
The details of which I will discuss and and outline in upcoming blog posts, however, this particular blog post is specific to search engine optimization in general. The concept of:
One thing I have learned in my many years of helping clients gain better search engine position is this... when in doubt, use your common sense. What I mean is this:
Search engines have one main function and they take it very seriously. That function is to find the best web sites, with the best content and information in relation to the keyword or keyphrase used. Over the years there have been many SEO professionals and companies that have tried to "beat the system" and apply shortcuts, tricks or "creative techniques". Even if these techniques sound cutting edge or make sense at the time, you always need to ask if the major search engines would approve and evaluate this method in a positive light.
Search Engine Optimization Conversation: I had a conversation today with a self proclaimed search engine optimization expert and after I had a chance to absorb the details of that conversation, I decided to write this blog article.
It seems that this SEO professional has a background in programming and has spent a lot of time developing software that has the ability to create thousands of pages of content automatically. My first reaction and thoughts were:
- This is a great idea.
- Since content development is something I am always preaching, this might be a great resource.
- The more pages under a given domain, the better.
- 5000 unique pages would take months or years under the traditional methods.
- What an opportunity to reflect many keywords and keyphrases.
- What a time saver.
After I had some time to process this long conversation, some other considerations took hold:
- Could this be considered a "black hat" technique?
- Would the search engine approve of this "shortcut"?
- Does this pass the "common sense" checklist I normally use in these situations?
- Is the cost worth the risk?
- Will the time (and money) invested in this process ultimately be wasted?
My conclusion is simple. If it doesn't make sense, and appears to be a shortcut technique, it will be seen for what it is by the king of all search technologies... Google! There have been countless methods of shortcuts and advantages created over the years and I can tell you from first hand experiences that they all get discovered and some times worse, a site gets black listed. In this case, it doesn't make much sense to me to fast forward the content development phase of site development. Google always wants to see original, well thought out content so they can then provide high quality search results to the Google user. As each blog article should be hand written and original, I apply the same rules to the pages of a web site. This common sense rule seems to be broken in this case.
I think that even though many site owners are not search engine optimization experts, they can always apply this rule of common sense. If you are interviewing an SEO (inbound marketing) professional and you are asking about methods and techniques, you must always evaluate these by asking yourself it they make sense in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or MSN.
Free Site Analysis
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
It's a new decade and by now, anybody (any business) that is paying attention can see that to ignore marketing their products or services by way of Internet (inbound marketing) can be death sentence.
I can vividly remember that not much more than one year ago, I had conversations with many businesses that had inbound marketing on the back burner. This was explained to me using many different reasons.
- No Internet marketing budget
- No marketing budget period
- They get all business by word of mouth (interesting comment in 2010)
- They have enough business
- They are not a "computer person"
- Their funds are all tied up in the Yellow Pages (or other outbound methods)
- My brother in law's ex-girlfriend manages my web site
As I'm sure many of you will agree and maybe not from your own experience but maybe from only the common knowledge and common sense that tells you that in 2010, a LARGE portion of the population turns to their desktops, laptops, and mobile devices to get information about pending service/product purchases. I believe my point is an obvious one that if you want to grow a business, keep a business or save a business, you MUST pay attention to this exploding trend of what we professionals are calling... Inbound Marketing
Other terms for this process are:
- Internet Marketing
- Pull Marketing
- SEO Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing
Components of Inbound Marketing include:
- Keyword research
- On page optimization
- Off page optimization
- Blog development
- Social media optimization
- Social media bookmarking
- Content development
- Analytics
- Traffic conversion
- More...
The other observation I have made as an Inbound marketing professional is that the amount of work has increased dramatically. As little as one year ago, a well executed search engine optimization strategy would provide traffic that would convert and translate into sales. Although this will still occur in many situations and for many businesses, it no longer enough for long term growth and exposure.
If you fall into any of these categories, my first suggestion is to go through the process of determining the condition of your web site. What are the Inbound marketing or search engine marketing assets? Where are the weaknesses? What do the search engine and social media sites see when they look at your site?
As a high level Inbound Marketing Consulting Firm and a partner of HubSpot, we offer our clients a series of reports that uncover this valuable information. If you would like to understand more about the condition of your web site, call us for a consultation. We are happy to educate and assist.
Search Engine Ranking & SEO Analysis Reports
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Tue, Feb 16, 2010
As SEO or search engine optimization become more important and a critical cornerstone of many Inbound marketing (Internet marketing) projects, I offer the SEO check list below. These are items that need to be a part of your "on page" SEO execution.
1. On-page Optimization:
Keyword Research/No. of Key phrases Optimized - Keyword Research is very important and can literally make or break your SEO campaign. Most popular mistake people make is to select one word or two word keywords to rank on. The whole idea of keyword research is to select realistic keywords which can bring in significant amount of traffic. We use paid version of Word Tracker and Google Keyword Research tool and involve our clients in keyword selection.
Optimization of Titles and Meta Tags – Title tag appears at the top bar of your web browser. Based on the keywords in this tag, search engines list the site relevant to a search made in their engines. It is one of the important aspects of getting rankings in search engines. Since this title also appears in search engines’ result pages, appropriate use of keywords in promotional language may result in more clickthroughs. We optimize the Titles and Meta Tags since these provide information about your Web page to search engine robots so that the search engine can better understand what your site is about. Meta tags provide this information in a format that the web crawlers/spiders that visit your site can understand.
Robot.txt Optimization - This file allows you to hide files or directories that you don’t wish the search engine spiders to find. You can let us know which files or folders you do not want spiders to crawl they will be disallowed. Here we create Robots.txt file. This file is created so that your site can be crawled and added to the search engine database. Using this file, you can also allow or block a search engine from crawling specific parts of your site such as the cgi-bin folder, images folder or any folder containing critical information.
W3c Validations - The Markup Validation Service by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) allows Internet users to check HTML documents for conformance to HTML or XHTML and is also a quick method to check for errors in code. We validate your sites as per W3C guidelines. This is done to make the source code of your web pages clean and concise which allows the search engine spiders to move more efficiently through your site. When it comes time for a search engine to add your page to its results, it’s going to have a much easier time understanding the page if it’s been validated. This will often get you a higher ranking in the results.
Working on the HTML source code - Apart from Title Tag, there are other sections on your web page which can be optimized. These include, Meta Description tag, Image Alt tag, Adding Header tag for important information on your web page. Sometimes we take out Javascripts and making them external to increase Text to HTML ratio. Open any site, right click and check view source option. It will show you the html code. Working on it means we will update the tags, externalize java scripting, add alt tags and hyperlink attributes, etc.
Editing Content for SEO - Copywriters will work on modifying existing content based on the keywords being optimized. Keywords will be strategically used within the content based on various keyword densities.
Image & Hyperlink Optimization - We incorporate keywords in Alt text of image tags and title attribute of hyperlinks. This helps to a certain extent in search engine rankings.
One way to evaluate the condition of a given web site is to have an search engine optimization consulting firm run an analysis and provide the related reports. For example:
Web Site Analysis Report
Search Engine Ranking Report
Ask us for a no cost report that might help you measure the SEO condition of your web site
Virtual Support Systems
www.virtualsupportsystems.com
reports@virtualsupportsystems.com
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Thu, Feb 11, 2010
There is no denying it, there is no avoiding it, Inbound marketing is here, and it's here to stay. As I tell anyone who is interested, either get on board with the new world of inbound marketing, or get run over. Andin 2010, you may get run over rather quickly.
The old or traditional method of marketing (outbound marketing) is being replaced because it has fallen down on the job. That's what happens to anything when it becomes inefficient, ineffective and there is a better way to do it. Don't misunderstand me, traditional marketing or outbound marketing still has a place in an overall marketing strategy but it is being out-performed by the new configurations of inbound marketing.
What is outbound marketing? Outbound marketing is the way we have created our marketing strategies and activities over the past 40 years:
- Television
- Radio
- Direct mail
- Yellow pages
- Billboards
- Cold calling
- Telemarketing
These and other "shotgun" message delivery methods have become more expensive while handing us decreasing results. Enter the new age of inbound marketing.
What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is the methods of delivering your message that you see exploding all around us. Elements of inbound marketing include:
The difference inbound marketing provides is simple. The use of the components above (and others) to get your message in front of those businesses and consumers who are already interested and actively searching for you, your products and your services. Doesn't that make sense? You only need to speak to those who are qualified and in need.
Although the principles may sound straight forward, it is usually not a cake walk to create a comprehensive inbound marketing system. In fact, it is getting harder as more competition enters the game. In 2008 and 2009, SEO or search engine optimization might have been enough to gain position and establish significant traffic. That however, is not the case in 2010 and beyond. Although common sense will tell you, competition plays a major role in dictating how arressive your inbound marketing campaign should be, know this, in most markets, competition is increasing monthly.
What to do? Learn, learn, learn... This doesn't mean you need to stop and reschedule your to do list and become an expert in this new discipline. It just means that the more you understand the basics, the easier it will be to find your specific solution.Educate yourself on what is available in terms of consultation, software and strategy development.
Virtual Support Systems