Small Business Website Marketing Blog

Use Google Analytics to find your best performing keywords

Ryan Kettler — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:17:52 +0000

Google Analytics is a great tool to use to monitor your website’s traffic. It provides you with a bounty of great data on a very granular basis. With Google Analytics, you can easily track traffic on multiple websites, gather intelligence on visitor behavior, set marketing benchmarks and conversion goals, compare new vs. returning traffic, view visitor trending and loyalty, and find out the different traffic sources.

It is within the “Traffic Sources” tab in Google Analytics where you can find out which keywords people are using to find your site. This is very valuable information because the more you know about the keywords that are used to find you, the more you can optimize your site for said keywords.

Follow these steps within Google Analytics to find out which keywords searchers find you for in the search engines:

View the full article here

Small Business SEO Tip: Be committed to the optimization process

Ryan Kettler — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:16:48 +0000

In order to reap the rewards of search engine optimization, you must commit yourself to the process completely. SEO is NOT a one-time event. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment. If you have a dynamic sitemap, the more you change the website, the better.

When you make a change to a page’s content or title in Preation’s Eden Platform, we automatically alert the search engines to come and crawl the new page so they can index it appropriately. The more often your site is spidered, the more likely Google will consider your site to be up-to-date and relevant for your targeted search terms (keywords).

Another thing to remember is to be patient. Organic SEO is NOT about instant gratification. Results often take weeks, even months to see. This is especially true the smaller you are, and the newer you are to doing business online. If you are looking for instantaneous web-marketing results, consider setting up a Google Adwords account.

This tip was brought to you by Preation’s Eden Platform.

Small Business SEO Tip: Do not create an entire website in Flash

Ryan Kettler — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:37:40 +0000

Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. According to the Search Engine Journal, “Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page… Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.”

“If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold,” the post continues. I always tell our clients who are interested in using Flash that the search engine spiders are not human eyes. They cannot see a beautiful image of your product, they can only see an image tag and therefore, they can not determine what the image is about, they NEED actual text on the page to update their index and provide relevant results.

This tip was brought to you by Preation’s Eden Platform.

Small Business SEO Tip: Use unique and relevant page titles and meta descriptions

Ryan Kettler — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:05:51 +0000

Use a unique and relevant title and meta description on every page. The page title is a very important on-page SEO factor. It’s rare to rank highly for a primary term (2-3 words) without that term being part of the page title. The meta description tag won’t help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your listing, so it should include the relevant keyword(s) and be written so as to encourage searchers to click on your listing.

Related bonus tip: You can use the meta keywords field to add common misspellings of your SEO target keywords in there, and any related keywords that don’t appear on the page.

This tip was brought to you by Preation’s Eden Platform.

How to add/edit my page title and meta keywords within Eden.

Small Business SEO Tip: Write for users first

Ryan Kettler — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:31:08 +0000

Google, Yahoo, etc., have pretty powerful bots crawling the web, but to my knowledge these bots have never bought anything online, signed up for a newsletter, or picked up the phone to call about your services. Humans do those things, so write your page copy with humans in mind. Yes, you need keywords in the text, but don’t stuff each page full of these keywords. Keep it readable.

Your pages should have a keyword density of about 5%. Anything more than that and you begin to sound “robotic” and repetitive. Anything less and you’re not giving your keywords enough exposure and the search engines disregard their importance.

This tip was brought to you by Preation’s Eden Platform.

Integrating social media on your Eden website

Ryan Kettler — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:42:58 +0000

Nowadays, you’ll be hard pressed to find a business that does not take advantage of social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These outlets give you the unique ability to reach out to your customers, friends, and other businesses online. They help spread the word and generate buzz regarding recent improvements to your business, changes to your organization, and important news and announcements.

In a recent blog post via Brooks Bell Interactive, they discuss the proper way to integrate social media with your website.

You can use Preation’s Eden Platform to easily connect your website to your numerous social media outlets and here’s how:

View the full article here

Small Business SEO Tip: Start a blog and participate with related blogs

Ryan Kettler — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:27:03 +0000

Search engines, Google especially, love blogs for the fresh content and highly-structured data. Beyond that, there’s no better way to join the conversations that are already taking place about your industry and/or company. Reading and commenting on other blogs can also increase your exposure and help you acquire new links.

Related bonus tip: Put your blog at yourdomain.com/blog so your main domain gets the benefit of any links to your blog posts. If that’s not possible, use blog.yourdomain.com.

This tip was brought to you by Preation’s Eden Platform.

5 Benefits of using Google Analytics for your SEO campaign

Ryan Kettler — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:48:09 +0000

Google Analytics is a free tool that you can used to track information about the way visitors to your site interact with it. During a search engine optimization campaign, you will need to use Google Analytics to track the performance of your keywords in order to have a successful campaign. You will be able to know how much traffic each of the keyword brings to your website. Google Analytics will open up a world of information you probably never knew about visitors on your site.

Here are some benefits of using Google Analytics during an optimization campaign:

View the full article here

Free Keyword Opportunity Report for Eden Websites

Ryan Kettler — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:58:58 +0000

When optimizing your website there are few things more critical than selecting the right keywords for optimization. Finding the best keywords involves understanding your prospective customers, analyzing your competitors, and reviewing search volume trends with the major search engines. Finding keywords that represent the perfect balance between relevancy to your business, search volume, and competition will ensure that your website is found by your most qualified prospective customers.

Once you’ve arrived at the best list of keywords you can use Eden to quickly and easily optimize your website’s content. But finding the best keyword list can be a challenge.

Today we’re announcing a free Keyword Opportunity Report (a $1,000 value), prepared by the web marketing experts at Preation, for every upgraded Eden account. This includes upgrades from a free trial to a full account and upgrades from any tier of service to a higher tier of service. If you have recently upgraded your account, or when you upgrade your account right now, you can request your free Keyword Opportunity Report on our website.

Use Eden to increase your Landing Page Quality Scores

Ryan Kettler — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:58:24 +0000

In a recent blog post by the Cost-Per-Click experts, ROI Revolution, they discussed how to get higher landing page quality scores in Google. Increasing your quality score will allow Google to serve your ad more often because the search phrase, ad text, and landing page text are all optimized and Google wants to provide the most relevant results to its users. The three areas that Google wants you to focus on to help ensure your website received a decent quality score are “Relevant & Original Content”, “Transparency”, and “Navigability”.

By using Preation’s Eden Platform content management system, you can easily accomplish each of these goals. Here’s how:

View the full article here