Online Marketing for Local Business
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Increasing The SEO Visibility Of Your Blog – Part I
13 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
A keyword focused and well written, keyword rich blog can naturally attract search engine traffic to your site for a variety of reasons.
Most blogs already have an “optimized” site architecture for the search engines, and have clear navigation options and links that go back to the homepage and other main pages of your site. They are also a simple way to keep your website content updated with fresh and relevant information for your readers, as thousands of readers of our Hat Trick Associates blog already know – increasing not only your search traffic, but you conversions and sales revenue, too.
So what are some of the other ways you can the SEO value and effectiveness of your blog?
Blog Directories
Links that “aim” back to your site can be very valuable to you in the eyes of Google and the other search engines, since they help prove that your content is valuable and relevant to readers. “One way” links, or non reciprocal, are the most valuable…the premise being that “two way” links (from two sites linked to each other) could simply be part of an agreement to boost each other’s SEO score.
One great way to provide some of these great one-way links back to your website is through blog directories. There are thousands of relevant blog directories online, of many different sizes and specialties or importance.
Adding your own blog to the right ones can be a fantastic way to share your web content while raising the search engine visibility score of your website.
Knowing which ones can be difficult for many folks, however, and without the right subscription software, the process of submitting your own blog to each directory can be quite time-intensive.
But not only do we write blogs and write web and social content here at Hat Trick Associates, we also have the automated tools needed to easily submit your blog to the hundreds and thousands of blog and web directories out there that matter, and which can really boost the SEO of your website content.
If you would like to find out more about using this valuable, convenient service for your own website and professional blog, please contact us here at Hat Trick Associates.
But before you head out to start submitting your website, there are steps you should take to optimize your blog even before you promote it. You want your site to get the best keyword placement in the major search engines, but for the right keywords…the ones that not only bring in but convert traffic.
Blogs Keywords
With blog content keywords, you can choose to target a generalized, high-traffic keyword, but you often have little chance of ranking well for this keyword, and might not receive much in the way of additional traffic. The better option is to shoot for a keyword that gets a more moderate level of traffic – targeted traffic – which can result in more subscribers and sales.
These more lucrative keywords are important not because they bring the most eyeballs to your site, but because they bring the most profit to your organization.
You might even be surprised to learn that there often is NOT a great correlation between high traffic and high sales.
Many of the most profitable Internet sites on the globe actually get more modest traffic – but their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of Visitors to Buyers, i.e. they rank for the right terms and keywords for the right subset of people who are suitable customers.
A good example of this phenomenon can be found right here on the Hat Trick Associates website.
We have a particular post on How Many Blogs Are There? This post has become a favorite of Google, Bing and Yahoo search, with thousands of visitors a month who find and read it.
However, much of this traffic comes from educational institutions or from other places in the world. In other words students conducting research or folks on the other side of the globe. High traffic, low conversions.
We are happy to share this information with whoever can use it, but this popularity and web traffic don’t actually bring in business. So focusing on the right, most lucrative keywords is critical for your organization.
If you don’t know what the best keywords for your organization’s website, that is another area that we can help with here at HTA.
Up next: Part II – Length of Search Query and Keyword Placement
Want to learn more? Contact us to ask any questions you may have, or to discuss your current web and social content programs and how we might be able to work together!
The Social Media Wildfire Effect
13 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
It’s a businesses greatest fear, but may very well be their most powerful tool: viral content. Over the past couple of years, the term “viral” has reared its head exponentially more and some have yet to understand the full meaning of the term when it’s applied to marketing and the digital atmosphere. Allow us to raise the curtain for you with wikipedia’s definition of viral marketing:
“Viral marketing and viral advertising are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of virus or computer viruses. It can be delivered by word of mouth or enhanced by the network effects of the internet. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.”
The most important take-away of the definition: self-replicating viral processes. Next time you’re in a marketing meeting and someone blurts out “hey, let’s just make a viral video!” don’t succumb to the concept of sending it to your friends and family and expect them to send it to their associates. It is never the company or business that “makes” anything viral, it’s the audience that spreads the message. For your message to even have a fleeting chance at going viral, regardless of form, there are three requirements:
1. Make it genuine
2. Make it enjoyable
3. Make it memorable
From that point on, you are on your own, for the force is powerful and may turn against you. Social media and the closely connected internet has made it possible for negative comments to appear quicker than ever and spread like wildfire, sometimes forcing the hand of executives to act quickly and creatively for a (hopefully) appropriate response. Here are a handful of cases showing the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Old Spice Guy
If you have children between the ages of 12 and 24, there’s little doubt that they have heard of “the old spice guy.” Weiden + Kennedy, the ad agency for Old Spice, simply stuck a guy (well, a quite ridiculously handsome man) wearing a towel in a bathroom armed with a camera, some props, and a computer and wound up snagging the most prized Grand Prix award at the prestigious Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June 2010 as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial in July 2010. Users online were given the opportunity to ask the Old Spice Guy a question and a response would quickly be posted. The message was direct, enjoyable, and comical thanks to intuitive writing, making it irresistible for people to share the videos. The Old Sprice brand was not shoved down viewer’s throats, but the videos were enjoyable, genuine, and definitely memorable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqoc6wTNotI&feature=relmfu
Domino’s Pizza Fiasco
In the spring of 2009, a video of two Domino’s employees surfaced and tainted the brand’s image with sights of the workers sneezing on ready-to-serve meals and even stuffing cheese up their nose and returning it to its proper place on the dish, of course with some extra “personal” ingredients. Within several days, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other sites helped this image-destroying video rise to over a million views, putting hot pressure on Domino’s executives to take action. Eventually, an apology was posted on the company website and current employees were even asked to spread the link through their own personal social media accounts. While the decision on whether to fan the flames or let it fizzle naturally is a tough slice to swallow, the company gained high marks for taking action and playing on the customer’s side of the field.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Z2x4SClaE
Taco Bell’s Mystery Meat
In January, 2011, a concerned California woman filed suit against Taco Bell with false advertising claims, stating that the advertised “beef” was actually more of a “filling” and didn’t fit regulated standards for considering the substance beef. As the news media caught wind of the story and began to air segments, Taco Bell was already hard at work getting to a viable solution. The first release was to an Alabama television station (WSFA) in a written statement: “Taco Bell prides itself on serving high quality Mexican inspired food with great value. We’re happy that the millions of customers we serve every week agree. We deny our advertising is misleading in any way and we intend to vigorously defend the suit.” Well that sounds great, but if someone did a simple Google search for “Taco Bell” what would they find? At first, the results were flooded about the lawsuit, but as the Mexican fast-food giant created online content through blogs, twitter, facebook, and other accounts, the sharing of positive content overpowered the negative, drastically reducing the lawsuit-related pages coming first in a search result list. To round out an aggressive stance on their passion for real beef, Taco Bell purchased a full page ad in the Friday, January 28th edition of the Wall Street Journal headlining “Thank you for suing us” followed by a full ingredient disclosure of their product.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/28/taco-bell-beef-meat-lawsuit-ads_n_815303.html
If you decide to try making a viral campaign, make sure the resources used have the characteristics to naturally spread and be shared and if your brand ever encounters an emotional upset by someone who has access to a computer or a lawyer, be prepared to fight back with content—and quickly.
New Services From Hat Trick Associates
13 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Creating your content is just half the battle of course. Continually writing and posting high quality copy on your site is a vital step, for both conversions and long term SEO success. But online distribution elsewhere is every bit as important to your web presence.
A recent study by McAfee found that four out of five website visits start with a search engine query. So if your website doesn’t have good search engine rankings then you’re missing out on 80% of the traffic you could be getting!
How Can Hat Trick Associates Help With Press Release Distribution?
We can greatly boost your online distribution with our new SEO & Media Exposure Professional Package. If you have a new press release, we can distribute your content to traditional media, newspapers, magazine distribution, and build your inbound link network to increase your credibility in search engines for just $169.
This package includes distribution to many online newswires and aggregation services and lots of traditional media, including thousands of newspapers and magazines.
And of course we can write the press release or article for you, with writing services starting as low as $125 per release depending on specific content and length required!
HTA – SEO & Media Exposure Professional Package for: Press Releases
* Distribution to US Newspapers (6500+)
* Distribution to Magazines relative to your industry (3500+)
* Distribution to search engines including Google, Yahoo, Ask, AOL and more.
* Distribution to popular newswires including EIN News, Inbox Robot, Google News, News Blaze, Earth Times, Financial Wire, Consumer News, Times of the Internet, Topix, RedTram, & more.
* Distribution to 40 premium news partner websites.
* Distribution to our Newswire Network (600+ industry channel websites)
* Distribution to opt-in journalists subscribers.
* Distribution through RSS and JavaScript feeds.
* Include your press release in up to 12 industry categories.
* Include SEO anchor text links and formatting in your press release.
* Include SEO tags/keywords linking back to your website.
* Next day distribution option (if submitted before 5pm PST, 8pm EST).
* Access to statistics to measure your campaign.
* Receive a Proof of Distribution report with links to your press release posted on between 40 to 60 websites.
* Include a video up to 3 minutes in length.
* Attach up to 7 files, logos or images (jpg, gif, bmp, pdf, xls, txt, doc)
* News shared on Press Release Twitter.
* Guaranteed front page display with our distributor.
* Press release review and optimization.
* Permanent inclusion in our searchable database
Have An Article That Needs Exposure?
Press releases are by design more immediate, and news related. But what about articles that aren’t about news items but instead do things like share tips and advice, identify trends, have human interest or business related stories, for just a few examples? By far one of the most effective ways of improving your search engine rankings is through writing and submitting articles. Why is this so important?
First, an article needs to be written, once again something Hat Trick Associates can do for you as well. But either way, your article needs to be written about something related to the subject of your website. For example, if you ran a website about sporting collectables you could write an article about how others could become collectors, or how to value or acquire items — basically anything you want to so long as it relates to your website topic.
Somewhere in the article you include a link to your website, and you then submit your article to ‘article directories’ on the Internet. An article directory is a repository of lots of articles that people have submitted.
Why Are They So Effective?
For every article directory that publishes your article you’ll get a link to your website (the link you included in your article), and also other websites might ‘pick-up’ your article to publish on their own website – meaning you get even more links. So the more directories you submit to, the more links you’ll get. Of course, you need to write a good quality article so that your article is published by the directories.
The reason article submissions are so effective is because each article is published on its own unique webpage, meaning your link might be the only external link on that page, which gives your link full ‘strength’. Also, because the article is based on the theme of your website your link is given even more strength.
How Can Hat Trick Associates Help With Article Marketing?
The problem with article directories is that many of them require you register before you can submit, which is a real pain. But this is no longer a problem! Hat Trick Associates incorporates an automatic registration tool that allows us to register with hundreds of directories in no time at all.
There is also a text randomization for the article Title, Description, Body, and Author biography fields, so if you are writing the article yourself, you can write something like “The {quick|slow} {yellow|brown} fox jumps over the lazy {dog|elephant}” and we will construct different sentences such as:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
The slow yellow fox jumps over the lazy elephant
The slow brown box jumps over the lazy elephant
…and so on….
You can do this for single words, sentences, or even paragraphs. You can even nest randomizations within randomizations! The benefit of this is that you can submit different article text to each directory, ensuring each article is unique, and therefore maximizes SEO effectiveness.We also don’t just stop at the submission stage, oh no, we can even log into your directory accounts and automatically check the article published status, when it was published, and how many times your article has been viewed – pretty cool ‘eh?
And since we’re all busy people and don’t really relish the thought of spending hours submitting to directories, we’ve created a system that can auto-submit for you.
HTA – SEO & Media Exposure Professional Package: for Articles
With our Professional Package for Articles, we can submit your article to more than 1,000 article directories. We designed the package to be flexible, so you can submit to just 25 directories to begin with, or 50…100…500…or all 1,000+ directories.
And our basic service package starts at just $1 for each article directory between from 50-100; just 50 cents per directory from 100-500; and then just 25 cents a submission up to 1000 and beyond.
And as always, if you need the article written too, writing services begin at just $125 depending on subject and length.
Our service offerings also now include submissions to over 4,000 website directories too, a topic for our next posting. The bottom line is – when you have distribution OR writing needs for your web content, contact us and see how we can help you achieve your goals.