Regardless of the type of business you have, your presence needs to be online. You now know that you need your SEO to be up to par and whenever anyone searches for you on Google, you must be one of the first page results. You also should know by now that you cannot in any way shape or form pay Google to have this done, so now you must solely rely on keywords to get you where you want to be. But where do you start?

Well, in any good online marketing plan your website first must be excellent. That goes without saying because it acts as your homebase, and a functional, well thought out page will make or break your whole initiative. But then what?

Well there’s Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, You Tube, just to start and a dozen other places that your business probably fits into. Get yourself a Facebook fan page first. It’s an easy enough service to set up that you can plug in your information and start a small Facebook ad campaign to amass some people to “Like” your product. Simply update a status everyday to remain relevant, and as a bare minimum.

And/Or go to Twitter. Twitter is NOT a place for you to advertise. It is a place for you to connect with your customers or clients and build relationships. Think of it as a sophisticated customer service center. It’s a place where you can monitor what’s being said about your company or industry. Interact… do NOT send automated messages.

LinkedIn is for your professional base. Create a company page – add a career page tab onto your career profile to enhance it and add videos of corporate culture, or to talk about your employees doing excellent work. The key to LinkedIn is joining and participating in groups.

YouTube is an excellent place to post your videos – especially if you have any kind of How-To’s involved in what you do. YouTube needs to be broadcast to other platforms though, so make sure your presence is already set up and functioning elsewhere.

So your website might be the first place to go, but you must follow up everywhere else. And make sure to search out those niche sites that will be oh so important to you!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an internet marketing strategy that helps your website rankings on search engines. With search engine optimization, you can manipulate your web design content by using keywords or phrases that search engine spiders can find. This will allow your website to rank higher on search engines and thus drive more traffic to your page, positioning your website and business among the top rank of searches.

Keywords
Placing keywords and phrases into your website is one of the main strategies of SEO. A good tool to figure out proper keywords is theGoogle Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool gives you data on monthly search volumes per keyword variations to give you an idea of the best keyword to use. Make sure to place your keyword frequently throughout your website or web article. At least ten times per 500 word article is a good basic amount for search engine optimization.

Meta Tags
Meta tags exist within the html of a website and provides a meta description and meta keywords hidden within the html tag of your website. Search engine crawlers can see this information and optimize your website based on your description and keywords. This can help your SEO by giving information about the content of your website that search engine spiders and crawlers can find.

Text Links
If your website has image links, flash or javascript navigation, be sure to add text links within your website for search engines. Text links, and text in general, are how search engine spiders find your site. Deep links are hypertext links that link to a specific page of a website, rather than the main page itself. Deep links from a high ranking site are sure to help your SEO.

Fresh Content
It’s important to keep your website fresh with content, keeping your website relevant to search engines. A great way to offer fresh content is by starting a blog on your website. This provides a simple way to update your website, as well as provide keywords for SEO. Quality and unique content is important for search engine optimization so it might be a good idea to hire a copywriter or SEO specialist. Contact Tempo Creative for your internet marketing and SEO needs and we can help get the job done.

There are very few businesses today that do not maintain some kind of web presence and most are doing everything they can to increase that presence as best they can.  Whether through SEO, PPC, or other methods the goal is to drive as much qualified traffic as possible to your website. But, what do you do once you get the traffic to the site. This is where well defined conversions play an important role.

When you plan your website or website upgrade you should think about what points of conversion you are looking for from visitors to the page.  In other words, once you get them there – what do you want them to do.  If its a simple sales site where a visitor can purchase and item and have it shipped or just download it, then an obvious point of conversion would be the completion of the sales transaction.  However, these sites would be short sighted to only utilize this one action as a conversion goal. A satisfied client is likely to return for future purchases, but life can be very distracting. If only you had an email list for newsletters or sign-up list for special offers. Then you send periodic emails or updates to clients to make them aware of happenings with your site such as sales or new products etc…  These types of sign-ups are excellent conversion goals with almost as much value as a purchase. Many visitors will visit a site several times before actually commiting to a purchase. These other points of conversion on your webpage will help encourage this process while gathering important information about your marketplace.

There are many types of conversions that can be of benefit to different businesses.  Here are few that may be of use to your business:

• Newsletter Sign-Ups
• Creation of  a User Profile
• Filling out a Contact Form
• Registering for a Course or Seminar (free or paid)
• Purchasing a Product or Service
• Request a Quote
• Forward Info From Your Site to a Friend
• Tagging Content To a Social Bookmarking Site (Digg, Delicious, Reddit etc…)
• Posting Comments to your Blog
• Downloading Coupons
• Clicking on Ad Sense Content

These are just some possible points of conversion. They are many more that can be very useful to doing business on the web. Think about what would help grow your online business and see if you can implement additional point of conversions to your page to help accomplish those goals.

Today’s major search engines such as Google and Yahoo continually refine their search algorithms to deliver more accurate results for their users. With this in mind, today’s SEO campaigns should spend no small amount of their time making sure that the website they are working on deserve top rankings. It can be extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve top rankings for a website with lackluster content.

Here are a couple of seemingly obvious tips, that get over looked all the time, that can affect how search engines perceive the authority of the content on your website and thus your rankings. These two simple things can help ensure your SEO campaign has as strong a starting point as possible.

• Spelling – You won’t believe how many sites we have worked on that have spelling errors. You would think that with all the spell checking tools available this would not be as prevalent a problem as it is. The negative impact of poor spelling can be fairly severe. It may cause a search engine to misunderstand your intent or damage the credibility of the content. Remember even spell checker isn’t always right. Double check your work carefully and make sure you don’t have mistake that a spell checker will miss such as “there” spelled “their” or other words that sound the same but are spelled differently.

• Grammar – yes we all may have hated our junior high school English classes but see if you can remember back to when your teacher was discussing sentence fragments or incomplete sentences. Sometimes when we speak we will use these, but when you are writing content that is supposed to be recognized as an authority then they are a big no-no. Sentence fragments can be easy to spot if you take the time to proof read your work. When in doubt, see if your sentence has a subject and a verb. Ask yourself if the statement makes sense on it’s own. If not, then it needs to be rewritten properly.

There are many grammar rules to writing a proper paper and they should be followed as best as possible. Try to avoid mistakes of this nature within your websites content before they go up on your page. However, if you happen to notice an error later on, you should address it as soon as you are able.

There are many platforms for which a website can be built apon such as Flash, Dreamweaver, Drupal, Straight HTML/CSS, WordPress, Zen Cart etc.. The list goes on and on with new platforms becoming available all the time. With the exception of Dreamweaver, any of these platforms could be used for a great website that can have a successfull SEO campaign. OK, yes you can even make it work with Dreamweaver, as lame a design crutch as it is.

A good search engine optimization company will know the strengths and weaknesses of the platform of a website and make sure to adjust the campaign to the specific site. Let’s take Drupal for an example. This is a platform that we happen to really like. We have worked on several successful SEO campaigns utilizing this platform. However, the “out of the box” Drupal package is not a very search engine friendly platform. This does not mean that Drupal is a poor choice for building a successful website. It just means that specific methods will have to be utilized to make sure that search engines can properly interpret the sites content.

The point is this, if you are launching a new site, it may be worth researching the cost, coding timeline, search engine friendliness and over all usability of your web design platform before moving forward. But, if you have an existing website, you can still greatly benefit from a properly planned and executed search engine optimization effort no matter what platform your site was built on. (Let’s just hope it is better than Dreamweaver.)

I am often approached by prospective clients who want to achieve top search engine rankings in time to capitalize on the holiday shopping season. Even in this year’s tough economy, online merchandise sales have increased by 10%. The growth of online shopping, or ecommerce, is without a doubt the fastest growing method of commerce. In order to successfully take advantage of the holiday season marketplace, businesses need to plan way ahead of time. Depending on your area of business, you may need to be moving forward on your SEO plans now in order to reach the rankings you need to succeed for next years holiday shopping frenzy.

Not every business expects the holiday season to be the height of their annual sales. There are many companies that experience seasonal trends to their sales. An ecommerce website that sells suntan lotion probably isn’t going to do as well in December as in June. However, there is still going to be some qualified traffic searching for these products at all times of the year. Having great search engine rankings is the best way to get a strong share of the available online sales. Once strong rankings have been achieved through a solid search engine optimization (SEO) effort, websites can expect to improve on their historically successful seasons. Equally as important, these businesses can expect to increase their sales during times of the year that are traditionally slower for their industry.

Many people in marketing, myself among them, feel the best advertising campaigns incorporate a variety of marketing methods. By utilizing a multifaceted approach not only can you effectively reach a wider audience but you often augment the other types of marketing efforts you are making use of.

One great combination of tools to use is search engine optimization and press releases. Search engine optimization alone can be an extremely effective way of bringing targeted web traffic to your site. Press releases do a great job one their own of letting people know about whatever is exciting or new at your company.

When you make use of both of these advertising tools together, the press release can enhance the performance of the search engine optimization effort. By sending out interesting, news worthy press releases you are creating off page content. If you did the release properly, then you have anchor text hyperlinks to specific pages of your website. A successful press release can be a very effective tool in link building for a website. If the story is really news worthy this can have a huge impact on an SEO campaign as many major news outlets may run with the story.

Think about what your business has happening that is new and exciting. If you have an SEO campaign underway, a press release may be a great way to go for you.

I am often asked by clients who engage our SEO services, “What can I do to help?”.
There are, of course, many things that can be done by clients, but for this blog post I would like to address the crucial SEO tools of link building.

We have done and continue to do SEO work for a huge range of business types. These businesses need to remember that they are the experts in their respective fields. We are the SEO experts.

So unless you are an SEO firm looking for our services (don’t laugh – it happens more than you think) you should know your business better than we do.  What I mean by this is you should have long standing relationships that have been built throughout your career within your business genre.  There are almost always link building opportunities to leverage from within this group of professional relationships. Vendors, distributors, and even customers to name a few, almost always have websites that might make for an ideal link.

One reminder though, once you have thought of a possible candidate website to go for a link from, check with your SEO team first. Just because you can get a link to your website from another doesn’t mean you should. Let your search engine optimization experts at Tempo Creative decide if the link is of value and how best to leverage it for the SEO campaign.

I recently spoke with a prospective client who wanted their website to rank on the first page for a fairly competitive keyword. They had it in their heads that they could help boost their rankings by adding a blog to their site. Not a bad idea, or is it?

OK, of course a blog can be a huge benefit to the search engine optimization efforts of any website. There is, after all,  a reason I am taking the time to write the content you are currently reading. But, can a blog hurt your rankings? You bet it can. There is an old saying: “Anything worth doing is worth doing right”. This applies perfectly to websites that are considering adding a blog to their offerings. Here is a quick list of 5 things to think about, in no particular order, if you are considering adding a blog to increase your search engine rankings:

• Frequency of Blog Posts: How often will you take the time to post content to you blog. I have come across a number of blogs that seem to get a post up on the website about twice a year. That is not exactly a way to build up any sort of readership and isn’t likely to add much benefit to your SEO efforts either.

• Commitment: Bloggers often come out swinging, but then can’t go the distance. They tend to post a good bit of content in the beginning and then stop. Maybe it’s because they run out of ideas to blog about or maybe they get bored. Either way these blogs quickly lose their interest from readers and search engines alike.

• Poor Code: A blog is still a web page. If you don’t know how to use meta descriptions, keywords, title tags etc.. then you aren’t going to get your pages crawled effectively by the search engines. Another coding issue with blogs can be the way your URLs are written. Let’s use WordPress for an example. WordPress is a very common blogging platform, and a good one at that. However, the default permalink structure doesn’t allow for any keywords to be used in the URL. There are simple fixes to remedy this, but you have to be aware of these problems before you can address them. Poorly coded websites do not often achieve impressive search engine rankings.

• Security Issues: There seems to be an endless number of blogs on the internet that either don’t have any security or really lazy adminstrators. Take a look at some of the comments that get approved on these blogs. Is it any surprise that you won’t get strong search engine rankings for your page when the comments are full of spam links? It is important to take the time to read the comments and make sure that they are appropriate for the content of the page. If you do choose to publish links from user comments, they had better be to legitimate pages of relevant content.

• Quality Content: Write blog posts that are relevant to the purpose of your website and will be of some value to your sites visitors. If this means waiting until you have something worthwhile or entertaining to say then wait. Poor content will lower the online reputation of your blog to both visitors and search engines.

Just because someone said you should have a blog on your site doesn’t mean you should run blindly forward with this effort. Having a poorly coded, infrequently updated, blog that is full of useless content and spam will make for a perfect anchor, pulling your site right to the bottom of the search engine rankings.

I was recently listening to a report on the radio that was explaining the drop in television audience numbers and the corresponding drop in revenue from advertising sales. As it turns out, television isn’t the only traditional adverting medium that has been losing steam. Print advertising has been reported to be down as much as 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008 alone. Many would argue that its is a sign of our struggling economy and that spending is down in many areas. While there is probably some truth to this, the state of the economy is only a part of the cause. The major influence in the decline of traditional advertising is the internet.

More of the population is switching to the world wide web for many of the activities they used to partake in elsewhere. Reading the newspaper with your morning coffee is now more commonly done online. Watching television programming and renting movies, yep online too. It should really come as no surprise that as the numbers erode from these markets so does the value of advertising within them. As these trends continue, more and more advertising resources are being used in various online marketing campaigns.

While there are many options that can offer a solid return on one’s advertising dollar, I strongly feel that organic search engine optimization is the best place to start. Having a website that is properly optimized for best results in the search engines rankings benefits your business directly. Receiving more visits from targeted traffic is an obvious step in the right direction. However, if you are making use of other internet advertising methods you will generally find that a pre existing SEO effort will augment the effectiveness of those methods as well.