We all know that testimonials carry a lot of weight in marketing your product or 
service. Word of mouth has always been an extremely powerful persuasion tool and a testimonial on your web site can act in the same way if it comes from a reputable, trustworthy source. Not only can the testimonial be read by your website visitors, it can also be read by the search engines!
The best way to figure out how to take over the top spots in the search engine results is by looking at who ranks ahead of you, your online competition. Chances are they are doing something that you aren’t in regard to search engine optimization. You can find out who your online competition is by doing a Google search for your business’ important keywords and see who comes up on the first page. You may want to consider scoping this search geographically if you only serve that particular area.
Search engines look at the amount of incoming links to your website to determine how much authority it has for any particular subject. You can find out how many inbound links are going to a domain by using BacklinkWatch or by Google-ing, “link:yoursitedomain.com”. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you an idea as to how many you should have coming in to acquire that spot in the rankings.
Not only does the quantity of these links matter, so does the quality. What do I mean by “quality”? Does the link contain specific keywords in the link text that correlates to your website’s keywords? What is the Google page rank of the link-containing page?
Last week we talked about how content marketing is helping small businesses build traffic to their websites. Content marketing is all about creating good online content that attracts the attention of the search engines, social network users, and other websites like blogs. Eden allows small businesses to do content marketing, with one easy-to-use system, on their own.
I recently spoke with Keith Bouchard of The Healing Arts and Massage School in Raleigh, North Carolina. Keith launched his website on Eden in November 2009 and it has been a big success.
Keith has done a great job of attracting new visitors to his website with content marketing and his business is growing quickly in result. In fact, his traffic has grown by over 400% in his first six months on Eden and he told us that his phone is ringing off the hook with new customers.
Learn how Keith is using website content marketing with Eden to build a steady flow of qualified prospects for his business. Read the full interview with Keith on our website.
Sonny at Shoeboxed, the online receipt and business card scanning company, had a great post last week about four web tools to help you calculate your taxes in a jiffy. We’re big fans of helping small businesses do things quickly, easily, and at a low cost. And what’s more of a hassle than calculating and filing your taxes? Quarterly estimated taxes are even worse since they come around four times a year.
Get back to working on the parts of your business that you actually enjoy and get your quarterly estimated taxes done with these easy tools put together for you by the folks at Shoeboxed. We hope to continue to see more innovation around age-old problems being solved with really elegant and low-cost online apps. Very cool.
Last week, I told you about the 5 benefits of using video on your website. I would like to tie this post in with a recent blog post by the Cost-Per-Click experts, ROI Revolution. In their blog, Chris Crompton, PPC Specialist, wrote about “How to Place Ads on YouTube with Google Adwords”.
If you’ve already determined that videos are a useful and effective means of marketing your product or service, you may want to consider taking things a step further and use Google Adwords to display ads in YouTube videos. This way, your ads will be displayed in videos that correspond to the search criteria used in YouTube, leading to clicks by qualified visitors.
View part one of the article here
View part two of the article here
Today’s websites offer many different kinds of media including blogs, RSS feeds, and social networking. Video can also play a key role in your website’s media. Video has become a very cost-effective form of communication which allows you to demonstrate your product and service benefits in ways that photos and text cannot. Two common online video outlets are YouTube and Vimeo. Here are 5 benefits of using video on your website along with step-by-step instructions on how to embed videos on your Eden website:
This blog post was brought to you by the Eden Platform.
The Meta Description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the head of an HTML document (a web page). Traditionally, the meta description tag is a short human-generated description of the content that a person will find on that web page. The search engines will sometimes choose to use the meta description that you provide for a web page as the description that shows below the page title and URL in search engine result pages (the pages people see when they search using a search engine).
The search engines analyze the meta description you write for each page of your website to see if it appears to be similar to the text they find on the rest of the page. If so, they may use it as the description they include with that page in the search index. If not, they may choose other words from the page, sometimes words found in headings or near the beginning of your text paragraphs, to use to build their own page description.
This blog post was brought to your by the Eden Platform.
The Meta Description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the head of an HTML document (a web page). Traditionally, the meta description tag is a short human-generated description of the content that a person will find on that web page. The search engines will sometimes choose to use the meta description that you provide for a web page as the description that shows below the page title and URL in search engine result pages (the pages people see when they search using a search engine).
The search engines analyze the meta description you write for each page of your website to see if it appears to be similar to the text they find on the rest of the page. If so, they may use it as the description they include with that page in the search index. If not, they may choose other words from the page, sometimes words found in headings or near the beginning of your text paragraphs, to use to build their own page description.
Let’s say that Google is a potential sales prospect and your web page is a salesman. The meta description can be thought of as an “elevator pitch” for the search engines to figure out quickly what the page is about. You should write a unique, one to two sentence meta description for each of your website’s pages. This allows you as a web page author to give a more meaningful description for your pages than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content.
The description is often, but not always, displayed on the search engine results page, so it can affect the number of visitors that choose to visit your website. Organic search results (websites that the search engines determine are relevant to a particular search) are displayed beside paid search results (advertisers who are paying for placement) so they are essentially competing for attention. Include some persuasive language in your meta description like “learn more about…” or “see how you can…” or “get more results with…” in addition to descriptive text about your page.
For example, a good meta description for the Services page of an interior decorator’s website would be “Get a coupon for 15% off our Atlanta, Georgia interior design services when you visit our website.” This description contains a strong offer “get a coupon for 15% off” and a call to action “visit our website” and also includes location “Atlanta, Georgia” and topic “interior design services” focused keywords.
To access the meta descriptions for a page within Eden, click on the “Pages” module and then click on one of your pages within the page tree. From the quick access menu, select the “Settings” option. Page settings can also be accessed from within the on-page editing interface by clicking the blue “Settings” button in the top left corner of the screen. Once in the settings area, the second field down is titled “Description”. That’s the one!
Since content marketing is very important for building visibility for your business. You need to be thinking about content and how you can continually change or update it. If the search engines see your website’s ever changing landscape, they will pay more attention to it. This will get you spider-ed more often, leading to more relevant search results. Content means adding lots of pages on your website and creating a large, robust website. Your website must grow to be noticed!
This blog post was brought to you by the Eden Platform.
Content marketing is the process of creating high quality website content that is so compelling that it attracts attention from your target market. Although content marketing is often used to maintain and nurture business relationships with existing customers, today I’ll be talking about how businesses are using content marketing to find new customers and build new relationships.
Let’s think for a moment about the ways that people find your website right now. Your website gets visitors who click through from a link on another website, visitors who type in your website address directly, and visitors who find your website by conducting a search using a search engine. That’s pretty much it. Visitors who click through from another website or find you through the search engines are often discovering your website and your business for the first time. From a marketing standpoint these are very important visitors because they represent opportunities for your business to build new relationships and sell your products or services.
So, since 1) other websites that link to you and 2) the search engines are such an important source of new prospective customers for your business, how do you get more traffic from them?
In this article you’ll learn the three components of high quality content and how you can build a lifetime of free traffic to your website with content marketing.
Optimizing your website for the search engines does not have to be a challenge. If you follow the simple guidelines listed below, you can increase the amount of qualified traffic coming to your website and decrease the amount of money you spend on SEO. Think of these tips as pieces of the overall SEO puzzle. Once you’ve completed them all, the search engines will know exactly what each page on your site is about. Before you start optimizing your site, you must first determine the keywords/phrases that correspond directly to your business’ core offering. This shouldn’t be too difficult as no one knows your business better than you!
If you do not have access to any of these areas with your current content management system, or do not understand how to change them, consider switching to the easy-to-use Eden Platform CMS and optimization tool.
Sign up for a free trial or contact our website marketing experts for more details or a complimentary one-on-one live demo.
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