Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is a very popular online marketing tool. Email marketing works just like traditional mail marketing, except the product is delivered directly to your client’s email inbox. Email marketing can get unwieldy without the right tools. Use an email marketing program, such as Constant Contact, to manage your email marketing campaign. Tools like Constant Contact enable you to create custom, branded templates, create and manage email lists, and track your results to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Web Tracking Tools

In order to effectively judge the success of your online marketing campaigns, you need to utilize Web analytics tools that provide you with detailed results. Google Analytics is one option for measuring your website’s performance, and Google Analytics conveniently integrates with Google AdWords to evaluate the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns. You can also use third-party tracking tools, such as Mint.

SEO Tools

SEO tools run the gamut from HTML checkers to keyword search tools to spider simulators, and everything in between. For simple SEO, you can use keyword search tools yourself to generate high-converting keywords for your niche. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is a free tool that can help you select appropriate primary and alternate keywords. If you want a more comprehensive range of SEO tools, SEO Chat has a great selection of SEO tools to cover practically every SEO need. SEO Chat’s tools include SEO calculators, page rank checkers, ROI calculators, and a range of other tools to enable you to tweak every aspect of your site’s SEO.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a fairly new trend, but one that’s growing exponentially. Businesses can utilize existing social media platforms as a valuable advertising and marketing tool. I’m writing a series of articles on effectively utilizing social media marketing, which includes an overview of social media marketing as well as individual articles geared toward how to utilize specific platforms. You can utilize various aggregators and plugins to integrate your social media marketing with existing marketing campaigns and platforms.

Interactive Content Marketing

Interactive content is a way for you to communicate directly with your clients. Interactive content includes things like turning comments into content, as well as things like featuring multimedia content on your website. Video and audio are far more valuable than simple text content, and provide another reason for your readers to visit your website. In online marketing, qualified traffic is the key to conversion, so featuring interactive content on your website gets you one step closer to improving your business.

Content Optimization.

Content optimization is one of the keys of overall SEO, and it’s a service that I regularly provide for my clients. To optimize your content, you should break your content down into digestible chunks that pertain to a specific topic. Make sure the content relates to the title. If you’re not sure what to write about, or what title to use, try a free keyword search tool, such as Google’s Ad Words Keyword Tool, Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool, or other keyword search tools. These tools can give you an idea of what people are searching for so you can optimize your content for popular keywords in your field.

Use headers in your formatting to improve SEO.

One of the most important things you can do to improve your SEO yourself is to use headers in your Web page formatting. Many people simply use a “<strong>” tag to bold important subheadings in Web page designs. This totally misses out on the optimization available by using targeted headings. If you use a “<h1>”, “<h2>”, or “<h3>” tag for your headings, search engines place more weight on those headings, and give you a higher page rank if your headings relate to your title and your Web page content. By using the <strong> tool instead, search engines read your webpage as having no subheadings at all, and you’ll miss out on the opportunity to take advantage of those headings to boost your SEO and page rank.

Pay close attention to Title tags in DIY SEO applications.

Title tags are perhaps the single most important part of providing good SEO for your Web pages. Search engines look at title tags for keywords, and compare the title tags to your page to see if the content supports the title. If you don’t get your keywords in the title tag, you might not get ranked at all for that content – in spite of optimizing your content. The closer the keyword to the front of the title tag, the more it can influence your page rank. You should also make sure that the important title keywords appear at least once in your copy – bonus if you can work it into your subheadings and use the appropriate heading tags.

Leave the styling for CSS.

We’ve already looked at what opportunities you miss when you bold your headers instead of using header tags. Similarly, you should try to forgo styling in HTML as much as possible and leave the styling to the CSS. When you use CSS to style your page, you can specify how headings should look, how links should look and what visual styles you want to apply to your website. That means less code in your Web pages themselves, since the code is in the style sheet – and a better code-to-content ratio, which improves SEO.

Additionally, by keeping your styling in the CSS style sheets, you can implement standard HTML tags and code and capitalize on SEO functionality. You can also easily change styles via CSS to alter colors and other display properties, and test how these font and style changes affect conversion. This gives you an easy way to improve your conversion rates without having to spend hours changing every page’s HTML.

Deciding when to outsource SEO.

SEO isn’t something that everyone wants to do. Even though much of SEO is simple enough for anyone to implement themselves, it does still take time and requires you to tinker with the website. If you simply don’t want to deal with managing your website, or making the little tweaks that improve your SEO, it might be worthwhile to outsource your SEO.

Beware of expensive firms that charge you thousands of dollars for relatively minor SEO tweaks. Find out exactly what a firm’s SEO services entail, and decide whether it’s worth the cost for you. Much of what SEO companies do breaks down into these SEO categories: optimizing content, optimizing title tags and adjusting formatting. The technical aspects, such as title tags and formatting, are relatively easy tweaks and shouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg.

For more info on things to look out for when you’re outsourcing your SEO, check out my article “Beware of SEO Firms.”

What is dynamic content?

Dynamic content has different connotations depending on the application. For our purposes, a dynamic website is one where the Web design calls content from a database when it’s requested. Without content, it’s just a basic, blank page, but with that call to the database (and content in the database), the page comes alive.

A blog is a great example of dynamic content, because you’re constantly adding new blog posts with new content. When viewers check out your blog, the default view is to pull X number of posts from your database and display them. Viewers themselves can interact with your content; selecting tags to view all posts linked to that tag, or doing the same things with categories.

Compare this to a static website, where every viewer who comes to the page has the same viewing experience. The only interactivity in a static website is the ability to click links or browse a page, which is far from the experience that you get from a dynamic Web site. A static website might be appropriate in some cases, but in most cases, it simply serves as a decent starting point for a website. In fact, some individuals and companies are moving away from static websites altogether, and using Content Management Systems with dynamic Web sites to communicate with readers.

Traditional blends of static and dynamic content.

More and more businesses these days are blending static and dynamic content on their Web pages. Static content can provide a decent way to introduce your company, mission, overview and service description – things that don’t change often. I’ve incorporated this strategy in my website; my main website is static HTML and CSS, but this blog represents dynamic content. More and more businesses are adding blogging platforms to share articles, post content or even share news updates. Dynamic content can be seamlessly integrated into static pages – like my blog looks like my website and has the same header. It also provides a lot of benefits.

The benefits of dynamic content

Dynamic content is wonderful for a few reasons: it helps to improve SEO and page rank, it provides additional ways for you to reach clients, and it gives you a way to communicate with clients and improve your conversion rates.

Dynamic content improves SEO and page rank.

Search engines like it when new content is added regularly. They view this as a sign that the website is active, and so your page has more value than an inactive website that hasn’t been updated in years. Therefore, you’re likely to get a higher page rank if you’re constantly adding new, valuable content. If you optimize your content to appeal to certain keywords, you can also capture searches targeted to those keywords.

Dynamic content adds new ways for you to reach clients.

Dynamic content can help you drastically expand your content base and gives you new ways to reach clients. Compare a basic company website with a company website that has a blog. In a basic company website, the only way you have to reach clients is if clients actively do a search for your services. For example, if you have a plumbing website, you’ll get hits for “plumbing” searches (or whatever keywords you’ve used on your webpage), but that’s all . However, if you have a plumbing website with a blog about fixing common plumbing-related issues, your blog could come up when people search for “How to unclog a toilet,” or “How to clear a clogged sink.” People who would never have seen your website are now looking at your website (via the blog) and you can nudge them toward your services, or you can simply provide useful information so that you can reach those clients and you’re there when they do need your services.

Dynamic content provides opportunities to increase conversion rates.

Finally, dynamic content provides opportunities for you to increase conversion rates. Let’s stick with the plumbing example. Say that a client is looking for plumbers, and loads your website as well as a couple of other websites. Your website is a static website with basic company info, while another plumbing website provides dynamic content with info about clearing up issues, related news and regular updates. Because there’s so much more content available via the dynamic content, potential clients can clearly see that the other company knows what it’s doing. The company speaks authoritatively about related issues, and customers have confidence in that company to deliver the services it says it can provide. They’ll choose that website with dynamic content in 99% of cases, even if you have good static content, unless the price difference between services is drastic.

Managing static content vs. dynamic content.

Some companies simply create additional website pages when they want to expand their content, optimize the site and provide additional keywords. While that is an option, it’s rarely the best option. It’s much easier to add 10 blog posts that relate to specific issues than to design 10 new HTML pages to add articles to your site. Then you have to redefine your menus and link system, and navigating all of those links becomes cumbersome for readers.

Updating a dynamic content platform is simple. Many Web hosts have built-in support for blogs and other content management platforms. All you need to do is install the platform and begin loading your content. Adding content to a WordPress blog on your domain, for example, is as simple as logging in and typing text in a box right there in your browser. You don’t have to worry about adding HTML or CSS or any other type of Web code, nor do you need to worry about your link system or where it’s an appropriate place to add your content. You don’t have to wait for a Web designer to implement your new content, if you outsource your Web design.

You need content to make dynamic content worthwhile.

Keep in mind that if you do go to a dynamic content platform, you need content to make it worthwhile. For example, consider a blog. If you only post once a month, or post 5 times and then stop posting entirely, you lose the benefits of having dynamic content. In fact, it can actually backfire on you if people go to view your dynamic content and see that you haven’t updated in a year.

If you’re going to invest in dynamic content, invest in dynamic content. Many companies hire writers to populate their dynamic content so they can focus on their business. Good content writers can create quality, targeted content that can enhance your company’s reputation, improve your SEO and boost your conversion rates.

If you’d like to discuss dynamic content campaigns or content management programs, feel free to use the Contact form on my website to send me a note. I provide blog content, articles and other Web content for a variety of clients, and I’m happy to discuss a content campaign for your business, or consult on appropriate content management solutions.

Keywords and Page Rank – the background details.

Before you can understand search engine optimization, you need to understand the basics of how search engines work. When you type words into a search engine and hit the button, the search engine ignores some common words (like the, and, to) and searches its indexes for references to the important words in your query: keywords. Web pages that reference all of your keywords get priority, followed by websites that reference fewer of your keywords. Search engines also weigh other factors to determine the order in which it displays results. (It’s also important to note that search engines can only reference pages that they’ve indexed, but I’ll save that for another article.)

For example, if five Web pages all reference all of your keywords, but one page has thirty inbound links, the search engine recognizes those inbound links as value and that page would come up at the top of your search. This is the page rank. Many factors come into play when a search engine is determining your page rank, but this is a very simplified explanation of how search engines work.

What is SEO?

What is this SEO stuff anyway? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of analyzing current search engine criteria and making sure your website scores high in all categories. The purpose of this exercise is to get you a higher page rank; the better you score on a search engine, the higher up in the search results your page displays. Some people pay for the top results by becoming sponsors or paying for expensive marketing campaigns, but you can achieve high page ranks even without paying for advertising if you utilize effective SEO practices.

Why you need SEO.

Your page rank for a particular keyword depends on several important factors, but one generality is true: the higher your page rank, the better. If yours is the first website that comes up in a search, you’ll get exponentially more clicks than the second page, and the second gets more clicks than the third, and so on. Average people don’t click on more than a few pages unless they don’t find the information they seek, in which case they may continue looking. If you’re on the second page of results, many people who do a relevant search will never even see your site.

That means its vital that you get your website as high as possible in the list of page ranks, in order to ensure that as many people as possible see your site.

The basics of good SEO.

SEO varies somewhat from search engine to search engine, as different search engines have different criteria for ranking pages. However, many SEO best practices apply to multiple search engines, so it’s easy to capitalize on good SEO. SEO depends on a variety of factors: the keywords in your page, the page title, your headers and the content in your page, and your overall Web presence.

Content alone is a huge driving force in SEO. You want your keywords to appear enough times so that the search engine recognizes them, but not so many times that they overwhelm your readers; the best keyword SEO is organic, so it reads nicely to human readers but search engines still like the text. This is largely a function of where you place the keywords and how you use them. If you use the keywords too many times, search engines will actually assign your content a lower value, as they’re designed to penalize pages that attempt to manipulate the search engine results. Organic ranking is always the best.

Beyond content, though, other factors influence your page’s SEO. Inbound linking is a huge factor in SEO. The more places that link to your website, the better search engines like your page. Search engines equate links with value, and the more links you have, the more valuable your content must be. Therefore, building inbound linking is key to differentiating your content from your competitors’ pages.

Why you should hire an expert for good SEO.

SEO is a constantly-changing target. Search engines update their algorithms and criteria as people find ways to try to manipulate them. Search engines provide value by linking to high-quality, high-value content. Search engines don’t want to link to low-quality, poor content – people won’t be satisfied with the results, and may have to go to another search engine to find better results.

What this means for you is that you’re better served by hiring an expert to provide you with content that has high SEO value than trying to learn all the intricacies of SEO yourself. To learn good SEO practices, you’d need to constantly be researching the industry, and you’d need to be a near-expert in many aspects of Web design, marketing and content creation. If you hire an expert, on the other hand, all you have to do is describe your goal, and the expert can create SEO content to help your website achieve the best possible pagerank.

Beware of hiring the wrong SEO firm.

However, you should beware of hiring large SEO firms that charge you an arm and a leg for services you don’t need or already have. I recently consulted with one of my Web clients about his site, and he told me he was considering hiring an SEO firm to improve his page rank. I told him to send me his proposal and I’d evaluate it for him – decide whether or not it was worth what the company was charging – and was appalled at what he sent.

The company was charging outrageous prices for many services that he either already had or didn’t need, and he had no idea, because they couched the proposal in technical language. I’m currently working on an article about the dangers of SEO firms and how to select an SEO provider: look for that article on Monday, January 18th.

I regularly write SEO content for a wide range of clients – everything from articles to web page content. If you want SEO content, feel free to contact me using the Contact page above and I’d be happy to discuss your project.