Archive for category Internet Marketing

Blog SEO: 6 Ways to Optimise Your Posts

You’ve published a new blog on your website. Great, you’re keeping your content fresh and your regular visitors engaged. However, if you’re hoping to use blogging as a way to grow your business, you need to expand your reach. How? By optimising your blogs so they are more visible in search.

Here are six tried-and-tested techniques to get your started.

6 Ways to Optimise Your Posts

1. Do Pre-Blog Keyword Research

Optimising a blog post shouldn’t be an afterthought. Before you even begin writing, you should be doing keyword research to understand what search queries your audience are commonly using. When you know this, you’ll know what they’re interested in and this will tell you what topics you should be covering to create relevant, engaging blogs.

Base each blog on a single keyword phrase that you want to rank highly for, and keep it focused. This will enable search engines to easily identify what your post is about. There are a number of online tools that can help you identify your keywords. Try Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest.

2. Insert Keywords into Your Post

If you’ve chosen a suitable, keyword-based blog topic, your keywords should appear naturally throughout your post. However, the best way keywords can help you optimise your blog post for SEO is to ensure they are visible in the places where they are most likely to be read and crawled.

This includes:

  • Headings/subheads – ensure the keyword phrase appears in the first few words
  • First sentence/final paragraph
  • Anchor text – the text you hyperlink to other pages
  • Title tags and metadescriptions – the text that appears for your blog on search engine results pages (SERPs)
  • URLs – the web address for your individual blog page

Importantly, make sure you don’t stuff keywords in so that they appear unnatural. Google will penalise you for doing so. Do it cleverly and sparingly: approximately six times throughout your body copy in addition to the above.

3. Focus on Your Formatting

Whilst relevant, quality content is paramount to blog post SEO, perhaps surprisingly, appearances also play a part. If your blog doesn’t look nice on the page or is difficult to read, which in web terms means not scannable, people will simply click away.

To create an SEO and people-friendly blog post (the two are not mutually exclusive), you should adopt the following formatting techniques:

  • Use subheads
  • Stick to narrow columns of text
  • Use lists and bullet points
  • Keep paragraphs short

In addition, ensure you are consistent in your font, heading sizes, layout etc. both within each individual blog and across your blogs. It simply looks more professional.

4. Include Relevant, Tagged Images

In every post, be sure to include high-quality images which are directly relevant to the content. This will enhance the readability for the reader. Unfortunately, what it won’t do is give search engine crawlers anything more to go on when it comes to ranking your post.

Why? Because crawlers can’t read images. What they can read, though, is text accompanying an image. Therefore, this is another effective place to focus your optimisation efforts.

As well as giving each image file a relevant title which includes a keyword phrase, you should also make use of ‘alt tags’. This is text that can be attributed to an image which describes in detail what it is. Although designed for accessibility, keyword optimised alt text can boost your SEO.

5. Include Quality Links

Links are vital to blog post SEO success. Links include internal links to your own content, relevant external links to other sites and backlinks – links back to your site from another site. Not only can they be helpful to the reader who might be seeking further information on a particular topic, but they also boost your own authority.

External and internal links enable search engines to better understand the topic you are writing about. They then reward you for adding value to your post. Backlinks, on the other hand, help demonstrate to search engine crawlers that your content is rated by other sites.

Blog post backlinks are harder to achieve but they will be more powerful.

6. Utilise the Power of Social Media

Blog posts that are popular on social media are taken by Google to be a sign of quality. Therefore, if your post receives a lot of likes and shares this will be taken into account when it is being ranked. To encourage this, you need to be promoting you blog posts on popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn – or whatever social media site is relevant to your audience.

The more likes and shares you get, the more exposure your blog will get and this can lead to further SEO benefits such as:

  • Increased number of backlinks
  • Improved author authority
  • More social media followers

As well as sharing your posts on social media, include social media buttons on your blog pages so people can like and share from there.

Apply these proven blog SEO techniques to your posts and you should begin to see your words working harder.  If you don’t have time to optimise or write your blog posts yourself, get in touch with us today to find out how we can help.

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Looking into Online Marketing Trends

For businesses looking to increase their market share in the real world, the virtual world may be the quickest fix possible. With consumer trends undoubtedly moving into the online environment, many business owners with brick-and-mortar stores are confused as to how to take advantage of their new marketing tools.

Contrary to popular belief, having an effective online presence can definitely increase offline business in a very direct way. Even if your industry is not one that is necessarily seen as an online venture, it can help to effectively use online marketing tools to bring people into your store or to use your services. Below are some ways in which you can increase customer retention by building an online presence.

A website increases visibility among your local audience

Believe it or not, the trend toward search for all businesses in all industries is tending towards the mobile smart phone and tablet realm. People are using Yellow Pages less and less (unless you are talking about the Yellow Pages website) and are looking to find more direct and immediate solutions to their problems through search engines. It just makes sense to redirect some of your marketing budget away from offline material to online marketing mechanisms.

If you commit to search engine optimisation, there is no market research that says you will do anything but benefit from it. Even the most conservative estimates state that any business without an online presence will lose at least 10% of their market share regardless of industry.

You can easily connect online marketing resources to off-line resources for a more ubiquitous presence. Get the most out of your offline marketing investment and keep your website(s) urls on all your printed content.  In fact, adding Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts are just as important.  Today’s consumer connects in various methods and if they prefer Facebook, then you want to be able to make that connection.

Perhaps it’s time to refresh your printed material with fresh artwork and messages.  We provide complete print management solutions, from concept through delivery. If you are interested in a fresh web design or other online marketing material, contact us today at 0433 399 294 or use the contact form here.

Growing Your Business Through Internet Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

Overview

The objectives of Internet Marketing are not different from the strategies used in offline marketing.
You want to attract clients and generate sales. The difference between Internet Marketing and traditional forms of offline marketing lies in the mechanisms used to attract clients.

Growing Your Business Through Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing vs Traditional Offline Marketing

Much of the business delivered by offline marketing methods relies on print advertising, phone book directories, radio or television advertising and business networks or referrals.

Internet Marketing delivers traffic sourced from search engine results, online directories and advertising such as Pay-Per-Click or Facebook ads. Trust and relationships are built by “virtual handshakes

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