TREVOR HEISLER

Increase the Visibility of Your Website, Naturally

1/28/2016

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UPDATED | Looking for more visibility for your company’s website?  Or perhaps you’re in the process of developing a new site and you want to make sure it gets noticed.  While you may have heard of advertising or otherwise paying for improved search engine results, the obvious, and often overlooked, strategy to improve your search engine rankings is to focus on organic search engine optimization.

Organic SEO is the process of improving the visibility of your site’s search engine rankings via natural or unpaid for means. Organic SEO typically involves improving the content, infrastructure, or other technical elements of your site.

This means that when writing copy for your website you should give strong consideration to how your content might influence search engines finding your site. This is especially important when writing copy for your site's homepage or front door.  

Search engines use the content of your homepage to determine what your website is about. Search engines then use this information and match it to 'search phrases'. So in writing your homepage you need to consider what search phrases might be used by someone trying to find a website similar to yours.  In addition to copy rich in keywords, you need to give consideration to URLs, headings and sub headings, blog post titles and internal links.

Investing in a social media strategy provides returns in the form of improved SEO

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Google’s crawlers love websites that have lots of quality inbound links.  This is one of the reasons why social media can be such an important element of your online marketing efforts. In addition to the ability to better engage customers and other stakeholders, social media can (and should) result in lots of inbound links to your website.  In short, the more people love your content, the more Google will want to return those results in the search engine results pages. 

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SMO – A Digital Marketing All-Star

12/3/2015

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Social media optimization (SMO) is the use of a number of social media channels to increase the awareness of a product, brand or event. In other words, SMO deals with enhancing your company’s presence and online reputation through interactive communities—not just Twitter and Facebook, but also blogs, forums, and anywhere your business is mentioned or linked to socially.

Whereas search engine optimization, or SEO, is focused on helping ensure your company comes up early in search engine results, SMO does this and more. SMO helps ensure target audiences already know about your company or brand and go looking for you.

SMO helps prove to Google that your website provides valuable information to prospective visitors. The more social media users engage with you and share your content, the more authority you must have in your industry, and so the higher you rank in search results.

SMO can help strengthen your brand and boost visibility, in addition to generating leads and increasing sales. Optimizing your social media builds both awareness of and trust for your business, because prospective customers will see you not only mentioned, but recommended by others.

It is important to note that social shares carry a lot more weight when they’re coming from someone else. By contrast, joining every social media group, community or discussion just to seed links to your content can actually be counterproductive, to both SMO and SEO. Additionally, random link-spreading without engagement and participation can get you unfollowed in your social networks.

To improve SMO for your business, in addition to having great content that is of interest to your followers, you should focus on engaging with target social audiences and contributing to relevant conversations.


Related reading: Increase the visibility of your website naturally
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5 SEO Tips for PDFs on Your Website

8/3/2015

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While the PDF format is the most suitable format for certain content on your website (i.e. instruction booklets, technical data sheets, white papers, etc.), the format is really not the best one for SEO optimization.  

Today’s search engines can scan PDF documents (whereas a few years ago they did not), but they are not as optimal as HTML content pages. That being said, if you have to have PDF pages on your website, there are several things you can do to ensure they help you on the SEO front (or at least don’t hurt you) as much as possible.

  1. Always use text-based PDFs that you can easily copy-and-paste versus PDFs comprised of pictures of text.
  2. Choose an SEO-friendly, key-word rich file name without the use of underscores. The file name will often become part of the page URL and Google has clearly stated that when it comes to URL structure, using hyphens rather than underscores makes it much easier for them to identify what the page is about. So, if you have to separate words in a file name, use a hyphen.
  3. Properly set the document properties of your PDF files. Pay proper attention to the ‘title’ tag and enter appropriate key-words.
  4. Ensure the copy within the PDF document is key-word rich.
  5. Capitalize on opportunities to create links, both in the PDF to other pages of your website and from other pages of your website to the PDF. Links to your PDF can help give it some authority. Links from your PDF to other pages in your site, well that’s just common sense, but please keep the links relevant. 
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