Web Technologies Specialist - Technologist: SEO

March 15, 2013

Success Through Internet Marketing Services

by Spencer Wade

The realm of internet marketing can be an intimidating place for those who have never ventured there. It is full of industry specific terminology that can confuse even the brightest minds. This article was written to try to shed some light on the unknown in order to help companies looking for internet marketing services to find a partner they can trust to do the job right, on budget, and with their best interests in mind.

The first thing to do when discussing internet marketing is to break the whole up into its constituent pieces. Internet marketing is, after all, a broad spectrum of services, and not all of them will be necessary for every business. This is why a marketing development plan can be so important for a company new to the internet arena. Just as in other phases of business operations, it is best to proceed with a fully-formed vision of what you expect, how long it will take, and what it will cost to accomplish the goals you set. The company you partner with can assist you with your development plan, and offer advice on what services best match your company’s marketing needs.

For the purposes of this article we will be dividing internet marketing into ten subcategories. These categories will be explained in some detail before the top ten companies in that particular field are listed. Each of these companies does excellent work in their fields, and any one would be a valuable partner for your business. The differences between these firms is usually the cost of their services, and, outside of that, the other differences are negligible.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is a tool that measures web traffic to a specific website. It can also be used as a tool for market research, and to assess and improve the overall effectiveness of the site. Analytics applications can help measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns, and estimate how website traffic changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provide information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views as well. This is a great way to gauge traffic and popularity trends that will be incredibly useful when doing market research.

Social Media Management

The term social media management is defined as applying social media in the knowledge management context to identify, share, document, transfer, develop, use, or evaluate knowledge. There are many benefits to managing social knowledge. When users have access to this information they have higher productivity and better performance. Utilizing us er-generated content through crowdsourcing can better leverage the collective and hidden knowledge of the company stakeholders and increase organizational learning. Due to the younger generations using social media as their primary form of communication when on and off the clock it is important to use social media to attract and retain talented young employees.

Content Marketing and Blogging

The term content marketing refers to any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content to acquire new customers. The basic premise of content marketing is providing some valuable information or entertainment (content) that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but seeks to positively influence a customer in a specific way. This information can be presented in a variety of media formats including news, video, blogs, white papers, ebooks, case studies, how-to’s, photos, etc. The most important facet of content marketing is its appeal to the Millenial Generation. This demographic contains over 1.8 billion people, and in a recent Edelman Study over 80% stated they expect their brands to entertain them. That percentage represents over 1.4 billion potential customers!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s natural, or unpaid, search results. Basically, the higher ranked the webpage is on the search results page the more frequently a site appears in the search result list, and therefore will receive more visitors from the search engine’s users. SEO takes into consideration how search engines function, what keywords people use to search for specific information, and what audiences are using what search engines. This data is then used to optimize a website by editing content, HTML, and specific coding to increase its relevance in terms of keywords and remove any barriers to the indexing of search engines.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)

Pay-per-click is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to specific websites. In this model, advertisers pay the publisher, or website owner, when the ad is clicked. Bidding on keyword phrases that pertain to their target audience, or charging a fixed price per click, sites vary, but all will use display ads to show up on relevant search engine results or websites that have agreed to show them. PPC uses the affiliate model to provide chances for purchase anywhere the target audience is visiting on the web. This is truly a pay for performance form of advertising, and that is a rare thing in this day and age.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is software with a focus on getting leads from the top of the marketing funnel through to the bottom where they emerge as sales-ready leads. The prospects are scored on their activities, and presented drip campaign messaging via email and social channels. This allows them to be nurtured from first interaction through to sale. This is most commonly used in business-to-government (B2G), business-to-business (B2B), or long scope business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles. This is, to put it simply, the merger of email marketing and a very structured sales process.

Video Hosting Management

Video hosting management services provide unlimited storage of your content with guaranteed uptime. This is an extraordinary function for marketing any business in the web-driven world of today. Video is a key component in any internet marketing strategy. These companies offer batch uploads, video content management systems (vCMS), custom video players, live streaming video capability, custom video email creation, video landing pages to drive conversions, and video analytics to see who’s watching to better plan and monitor targeted marketing campaigns.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is simply creating an experience that turns visitors into customers. This can be a very complicated process due to the fact designing a site that best appeals to the target audience must, to truly be effective, take into account the human psyche and psychological tendencies proven over decades of study. The details of CRO are way too complex to fully elaborate on here, but, luckily for companies today, there are services available that are strategically aimed at doing this very scientific task.

Crowdsourcing

The practice of getting needed services, content, or ideas by asking for contributions from an online community, instead of the traditional route of employees, partners, and suppliers is known as crowdsourcing. This can be an online or offline process, but the concept remains the same; to combine the efforts of volunteers and workers, where each contributes a small portion, in order to get a significant, large-scale result. Where outsourcing is giving a task to a specific, defined group, crowdsourcing is giving the same task to the general, undefined public in hopes of a greater, more detailed result.

Email Marketing

The name says it all when it comes to email marketing. It is, at its most basic, marketing a commercial message to customers via email. That definition could include any email correspondence between a company and its customers, but it usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations. The primary purpose of email marketing is the building of trust, loyalty, and brand awareness amongst a target audience. This widely used, highly successful marketing strategy is expected to bring nearly $2.5 billion US dollars to providers by 2016.

Conclusion

All of the companies named within this article are market leaders in their categories. They have proven themselves capable of innovative solutions to improve web marketing processes and practices. Each has an exceptionally strong reputation in their field, and offer tremendous value to their business partners, There is no question that they are fully capable and enthusiastic about helping your business ventures reach their full potential.

February 3, 2013

SEOmoz: A Path to Power in Search Engine Optimization

by Spencer Wade

SEOmoz is one of the great names in SEO. Founded by Rand Fishkin, it has grown into the best website for SEO beginners. They have also developed online SEO tools that are possibly the best that can be found.

SEOmoz is an incredible asset due to the tremendous amount of free SEO information that can be accessed through their site. The SEOmoz blog is always full of SEO tips and case studies, and their Whiteboard Friday is an awesome resource.

The SEOmoz site offers a paid member option called SEOmoz Pro. This membership gives full access to the SEOmoz suite of tools, and, more importantly, gives members entry into advanced SEO training workshops and training courses. The company offers a 30 day free trial of SEOmoz PRO, so sign up and play around with it to see if it’s right for you.

“Effectively Manage Your SEO” is the caption found on the SEOmoz homepage. In order to facilitate management of your SEO, the site gives users the ability to create campaigns for the different sites you own. As a PRO member, you can create up to 5 campaigns. This will help you in many ways when dealing with SEO.

Rank Tracking

The first step in improving your search engine rankings is knowing where your pages rank for specific keywords. Tracking your rankings over time will show you exactly how your SEO efforts are affecting your keyword rankings. SEOmoz Pro allows tracking of keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It also allows you to view your rankings over time in charts designed to display the results found.

SEOmoz Pro makes it possible to connect your Google Analytics account to SEOmoz. This gives the user traffic stats for different keywords. This feature can be used to identify keywords that do not rank high, but still give the site some traffic. Focusing SEO efforts on these keywords can boost traffic for the site once the rankings have improved. The only negative in this area is that rankings are only updated once a week; daily reports would be much more helpful.

On-Page SEO Reports

On-Page SEO Reports are very useful tools. They become even more important if you are new to SEO. Basically, a report will tell you how optimized your pages are for a specific keyword. The report gives results in a letter grade format; from A to F. The factors used to determine your grade are also given in detail. The factors are categorized by importance, so focusing SEO efforts on the most egregious errors will greatly aid in improving your search engine rankings.

Upon completion of site setup, the SEOmoz crawler will analyze your site for SEO related issues. These issues are displayed in one of three different categories depending on what type of issue is found. These categories are errors, warnings, and notices.

The findings of the Crawler can be quite important to fix. Issues like duplicate content and broken links can cause serious problems for an SEO user. The Crawler is able to identify these issues so that they can be rectified efficiently. Once issues are identified and remedied, your site will never again miss out on all the potential revenue lost to these mistakes.

Link Analysis

The Link Analysis feature is a standalone tool powered by SEOmoz’s incredible Linkscape Database. This database boasts an amazing 1.2 trillion crawled URLs in its inventory! This is an awesome collection of data that is available to all SEOmoz users.

Using a variety of metrics, the Link Analysis Tool compares your domain with up to three different competitors. These include SEOmoz’s proprietary metrics such as Domain Authority, MozRank, Page Authority, and MozTrust. It also displays other important metrics like total links you have, number of linking root domains, and number of class C blocks that are linking to you. You can also check the backlinks to your site and your competitor’s sites. By studying the external links you can do a comprehensive competitive analysis on your competitor’s linking profile. This will allow you to see where your competitors are getting links from, and find sources of links that you can use as well.

Other SEOmoz Offerings

Up to this point, I have only brushed the surface of what SEOmoz offers. The examples listed represent only a small portion of the available tools found at the site, and the descriptions given are only basic in their scope. SEOmoz Pro offers a Q&A Forum where users can get answers to all their questions. There is an extremely large, active, and helpful community of SEO professionals found there that are ready, willing, and able to lend their expertise to any issue you may face after becoming a member.

The forums you find there are full of information. These forums are set up to be browsed for answers to commonly asked questions, or you can ask specific questions that pertain to issues that are not listed on the board.

SEOmoz hosts webinars for its Pro members every month. These webinars focus on SEO or marketing topics, and end with an extended Q&A session. All in all the webinars average 90 minutes, and are full of useful information for SEO professionals and novices alike. These webinars are also archived at the site for easy viewing at any time, so even if you cannot make the start time for a particular webinar you can still watch it.

Final Thoughts

SEOmoz is a site that is well worth your exploration, and the Pro membership, for anyone serious about SEO, is well worth the cost. The tools are of the highest quality and their usefulness is beyond question. As a SEO consultant or provider, the Pro membership is a necessity. It will prove its worth on a daily basis in innumerable ways, and will open up revenue streams for you and your clients you had never dreamed possible.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Success Through Internet Marketing Services

SEOmoz: A Path to Power in Search Engine Optimization