Propel Marketing, LLC

Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Bing, Yahoo to Merge, Microsoft Bets Big on Middle America

Bing and Yahoo to Merge Search in 2010

As news of Microsoft and Yahoo’s search partnership deal has darted around the blogosphere and across the world, SEMs and SEOs are coming to terms with the realities: Read the rest of this entry »

Not all websites are created equal, but there are ways that all websites can increase clicks and traffic using On-Page Optimization (OPO).

The real challenge in understanding how to improve your website comes in installing and interpreting analytical software.  Now, I won’t drone on about all of the benefits to installing Google Analytics.  Just get it done and start to look at your traffic.

Monitoring what people are doing when they get to your site (”bouncing” vs. clicking) and where they are going can help you determine what features your site might be lacking.

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Prioritizing Your Website Optimization Strategy

As an SEO, determining what constitutes a bottleneck for your client’s website is a high priority. After identifying SEO problems, you can define strategies and tactics to overcome them. These days, we see the most common SEO bottlenecks occur in the accessibility-useful-intuitive portion of a visitor’s conversion path. Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this concept was first introduced for website prioritization by Bryan Eisenberg. While Eisenberg mostly sticks with a modified sales funnel metaphor, I think a bottleneck model is currently more relevant, as really any part of the SEO process can have a dramatic effect on ROI.

SEO Conversion Path Bottleneck

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The Most Important Aspect of SEO Consulting

Low Hanging Fruit

When a client comes to you with a new website project, it’s easy to get excited by the prospect of all the little and large SEO 1.0 and SEO 2.0 changes you can make with regard to making a website more search engine friendly. Better branding, better web design, more aesthetic appeal, new copy…where to begin? This brainstorm is a necessary part of the process. You have to have blue sky sessions where all possibilities are explored uncritically in order to prioritize your project for maximum ROI, but are all these ideas relevant today? How do you choose? Read the rest of this entry »

Google is currently giving extra love to video, and there’s no doubt that it is a good move for them. We all love watching videos, and videos that pertain to products or services being provided are a must for high-end companies.

Videos create a lasting impression for visitors, engaging users to stay on websites longer and make more purchases. Research indicates that embedded videos are not as highly-valued as proprietary site-run videos. Some have reported a 55% jump in conversions after enabling videos about their services on their website!

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For SEO and improvement in your website’s rankings, make sure that anything you put on your website is unique. Compiling content to increase your page count will get you nowhere fast unless it is interesting, useful, and original.

Occasionally I hear someone talk about copying relevant content from other sites to bulk up their website. While it’s great to add syndicated feeds of new article excerpts, photos, or tweets from others online, when you do so you typically link back to their website. Simply copying someone else’s writing is not only unethical — it will not give you an SEO boost, and may in fact hamper your long term efforts.

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Being in the business of optimizing websites, it’s no surprise that I get asked, “what is SEO?” Many have the idea that SEO is a “rip-off,” as results can take time to collect, and not all businesses are meant to be #1 on Google. In truth, many of these so-called SEO companies are using old practices and charging you for outdated materials. Beware of extreme promises of rankings and techniques that seem to “trick” users somehow. These old, seemingly-simple practices can actually drag you down on major search engines.

Search engine optimization in its earliest form (let’s call this SEO 1.0) was all about matching titles and domain names to products & keyword search phrases, making the site as easy as possible to crawl for Google and other engines. While these basics are indeed important to start with when building your online market, much more can be done. The businesses who still use this antiquated approach to optimization are probably looking for a 2.0 version, but end up spending up to $1,000 per month for 1.0 tips. How do you make sure your SEO company is using 2.0?

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Google Guesses

Optimizing your website for Google and other search algorithms

Ever wonder where Google gets its search results? Here’s how it works:

They guess.

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