Tag: SEO

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SEO – Is It Worth the Trouble?

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McCord Web Services is one of the few Google Partners in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area.

Is SEO or search engine optimization worth the time and trouble today? With Google seemingly to be changing all the rules and more competitors moving into your own marketing landscape, it may seem like a losing proposition, but… there are smart things you can do that DO payoff for placement.

What are the smart things that any small to medium sized business can do to improve organic search placement?

  1. Make sure you have unique content and work hard to make your website experience different from others in your vertical (business classification).
  2. Make sure you are blogging regularly – at least once a week. If you are not a good writer, invest in finding a firm that you can trust that will create great linkable and sharable content.
  3. Make sure you have unique Meta Title and Meta Description tags for all pages in your website.
  4. Claim and authenticate your website in the Google and Bing Search Consoles. You’ll get information that will help you do a better job and understand what Google and Bing think about your site so you can improve.
  5. Implement Google Analytics. You cannot improve your own website if you do not know how visitors are using it. Got a low bounce rate? Pat yourself on the back and find out what people seem to like about the page with in-page analytics. Don’t have many visitors? Get the truth and then drive traffic there with Google AdWords.
  6. Get a full SEO evaluation and roadmap on where you are and how to get to the next level personalized based on your own statistical information.

You can still succeed and garner search engine placement with optimization, but be smart and savvy about the tactics that are used. Don’t buy into link building, link farms, and guest blogging on off-topic sites. Think mainstream, great content, and excellent user experience.

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Will Blog Post Titles as Questions Place Organically?

Wow, blogging is still practical for SEO!
Wow, blogging is still practical for SEO!

Want to crack the top ten sites in your industry? Get blogging and craft your blog posts as questions. It can’t be just any question, but as you decide what you will write about for the month, think about what prospects may use to do searches with to find your services.

If we took my industry as an example, here might be a few good post titles to get you thinking about how to make post title questions:

Will blog post titles as questions place organically?

Will the Google AdWords Change to Quality Score Impact You?

What Are You Doing to Wean Yourself Off Pay Per Click?

What Should You Watch in Google Analytics?

What to Do When You Only Place Organically for Your Business Name – Part Two

Some of these topics I have actually written about and when they are shared on Google+, at least for my business, they are appearing in the search results tagged with my Google+ page. If you follow me or my business on Google+ these same blog posts may appear in your search results next to an image of me.

Blogging is still a very popular way to garner inbound links naturally, but business owners have lately decided that blogging is not valuable for their needs. If you ask any SEO or visibility experts such as myself, we feel that blogging is still highly valuable as part of an overall marketing strategy.

Need to get blogging without the headaches? We can help. Check out pricing and blog writing samples.

 

 

 

 

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Why Blogging Still Matters for SEO Purposes

Take off your "rose-colored glasses"!
Take off your “rose-colored glasses”. Blogging does matter for site placement.

Blogging has recently seemed to fallen out of favor with small business owners and I think that it is unfortunately due to a misperception of what blogging is and does for a business website.

Here’s why I personally feel that blogging is still very important for SEO purposes:

1. For on-domain blogs, search engines will consider each new blog post as a new page to the parent website – building authority.

2. For on-domain blogs, new blog posts for search engines = fresh new content; encouraging search spiderbots back more frequently.

3. Blog content, when well written, can keep readers on your website longer which gives your site stickiness. As Google is tracking everything on your site including time on your site, stickiness is important.

4. Blog posts that have titles crafted as questions may place in the top search results and be an avenue that prospects use to initially enter your website.

5. Sharing your blog posts on social media will also drive inbound traffic to your site; where readers will follow links from blog posts into website content. Without something strong to point to in social media your posts simply become spammy background noise to others instead of something informational and of value.

What I hear from  prospects is that they believe that blogging is only about content creation and is fine when used at a frequency of only once a month if at that. However, the key to having blogging work for you as an SEO tool is to blog with a greater frequency. (I personally like the content that is created on a three time a week frequency, but understand that for budgets sometimes once or twice a week is the max that can be afforded.) I never recommend blogging less than once a week for any type of SEO results.

For those that blog once a month or twice a month, they will never realized the benefits that regular and more frequent blogging provides as  an inbound marketing strategy. They will continue to feel that blogging is not valuable while their competition is blogging more frequently and building authoritative content faster and placing better in Google.

To find out more about our blogging program, please visit our website for pricing and content samples.

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What Are You Doing to Wean Yourself Off Pay Per Click?

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We put the pieces together for you to build great, sharable content.

Have you been grumping about your pay per click bill? Do you look at the unpaid listings on Google.com and dream about appearing in the top ten results?

If you are only spending your marketing dollars on Google AdWords and not investing in building great content for your website by using an on-domain blog then you are never going to wean yourself off pay per click advertising.

You can get organic search activity, social shares, and build natural links when you regularly write blog posts on your website. Google and Bing love that you are keeping your content fresh and that you are building slow, natural links. The first page a new visitor sees may just be a blog post which then leads them into your website. You may even build your e-newsletter subscriber base from great blog content.

More site owners are moving away from blogging and moving into pay per click advertising forgetting that although pay per click has an immediate return, blogging and content building have a place in a long term marketing strategy that builds value for search engines and enhances prospect engagement as well as keeping readers on your website longer.

If you are thinking about blogging, I invite you to read samples of posts we have written to see if now may be the time for you to start posting again on your blog. Our capable blog writers and knowledgeable oversight makes the creation of sharable content easy.