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Drive More Traffic to Your Website with the Right Key Words

Drive More Traffic to Your Website with the Right Key Words

Have you ever wondered why one website gets more visitors then another? It’s not necessarily because one costs more money, has great photos or has been around longer. It often comes down to one very simple but often critically overlooked step – using the right key words, title tags and meta descriptions.

Key Words Count
The first thing you should do – whether setting up a new website or optimizing an existing site – is to research and create a list of key words that are relevant to your company and industry.  A good rule of thumb is to approach it from a potential customer’s perspective – what words would they be typing into a search engine if they are looking for your company? A good way to build a list of key words is by using tools such as Ubersuggest, which recommends relevant words and phrases based on the key words you enter.

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in General / SEO  by admin

Google’s Algorithm Update: What You Need To Know

Google's Algorithm Update

For SEO professionals like us, search algorithms drive our entire process. Staying on top of trends and changes helps us help our clients’ websites rank higher and attract more visitors. On April 21st, Google announced that its algorithm will now give greater relevance to mobile-friendly websites and app content in its search results viewed on mobile devices. If you follow trends in SEO on any level, you’re probably already aware that the use of mobile devices to search and view webpages has steadily increased over the past several years and will only continue to grow and even surpass desktop in search volume.

This means that any business that wants to stay the most relevant and on top of their customer base needs to have their websites optimized for mobile devices.

Why optimize?

If you work in an industry where mobile traffic makes up only a small portion of your business, you might be asking yourself why you need to spend the time and money to make your site mobile-friendly. Aside from the global growth of mobile search, Google has found that 70% of mobile users use click-to-call, a feature that desktops don’t have.

With the April 21st update, Google is recognizing the already documented trend of increasing use and relevance of mobile devices as a platform for both web search and e-commerce through both apps and traditional search engines. If you’re serious about keeping your business relevant in today’s fast-moving digital economy, you need to optimize.

Bottom line, having a responsive website is the key to staying in the game and being competitive online. 

in blog / Blogging / Mobile Website / SEO / Services / Website Design  by admin

Download my SEO Cheat Sheet from SMBME: Speed Dating Style

Thanks to everyone that attended the Social Media Breakfast Maine: Speed Dating Style on 8/25/2011. We were delighted to be the SEO Expert on-hand to help answer everyone’s questions. Below is my SEO cheat sheet on link building which was one of the most popular questions.

SMBME: Speed Dating Style – SEO Expert

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in Events / Link Building / SEO / Social Bookmarking  by Nathan O'Leary

Why You Should Hire Us As Your Maine SEO Consultant

If you have taken a jump into the land of SEO [search engine optimization] only to find yourself completely overwhelmed and not sure if the SEO techniques you are currently doing or reading about will only end in you being black-listed by Google, which means your business’s is dead on the Internet. Did you just find out that “Yes!” you can be black-listed on Google? If the company or individual you hire is not practicing what we call “White Hat SEO” AKA the good SEO techniques, you will end up in the one spot you don’t ever want to be… Not a friend of Google!

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in SEO  by Nathan O'Leary

Local SEO For Your Maine Small Business

By now you are probably familiar with what SEO [search engine optimization] is and how incredibly valuable it is to you and your business. In fact, it is getting to the point that if you website isn’t optimized correctly, you are probably missing out on many, many valuable clients/customers.

Did you know that 20% of all the searches that Google processes are related to local search? This means that at least 20% of users are now adding a location to their search. Since there are so many people that are looking for Google’s recommendation on local services, there is a huge opportunity for those local businesses to increase their online visibility, even if they don’t already have their own website.

There are some things you want to make sure you include when you are doing local SEO for your Maine small business:

  • Owner verified listings – Local Yahoo, Yelp, Google Places, Bing Local, plus hundreds more! Add all information – Pics, logos, video, URL, email. You want to make all of the information you have on the Internet about your business the SAME! Also, double check that you selected all possible categories that are related to you business.
  • You want to make sure that you have your physical address on your website as text, not an image! This is a common mistake found on many websites.
  • Verify that the ‘Whois’ information for your domain name matches your business’ address.
  • You also want to make sure that your BBB [Better Business Bureau] listing and other professional memberships link back to your website. These are a strong indicator to Google about the trust and credibility of your business.

Local SEO for your business is only one piece of the inbound marketing puzzle, but a very important one. Too many business owners over look taking the time to verify their listings across all of the various sites and don’t fill them out completely. If you need assistance with your local SEO efforts, whether you’re not sure if your listings are verified or want to fill them out completely with pictures and video, give Mainely SEO a call today for a free consultation.

Below are the slides from my recent presentation on Local SEO for 2013 at SMBME.

in SEO  by Nathan O'Leary

Why You Should Comment On Blogs To Build Your Brand

If you have your own business then you know how important it is to get your brand “out there.” By now you also know how important it is to have a strong web/social media presence if you expect your company to survive and thrive amongst your competition. Part of  the strategy to meet your goals and build your brand should be to actively blog comment.You should also be participating in the conversations in and around your brand’s niche. There’s a whole lot going on in cyberspace regarding you company’s specialty, I guarantee it! And why wouldn’t you want to be an active participant? If you aren’t, you are probably missing out on precious dollars that I know you would love to have.

I read a lot of blogs each and every day and I am very thankful to Google Reader for keeping it all organized for me, but I am even more thankful to all of the bloggers out there that keep the original, awesome content coming! If you read other blogs, I guarantee that you will come up with some ideas that could help your future blogging efforts or that may help you to market your brand more effectively. Either way it’s all good stuff.

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in Link Building / SEO  by Nathan O'Leary

What is SEO and Do I Really Need it?

I am sure by now you have heard and seen the term “SEO” and if you don’t know what it means, I am sure you have either Googled or asked a friend, “What does SEO stand for or mean?” It stands for Search Engine Optimization. Now you’re asking yourself “What does it mean to optimize a search engine?” And Do I really need it? If you want traffic to your website then “YES!” you not only need SEO, your website/business’s survival and growth depends on it. Many business owners don’t realize they need it, but once we begin to list the advantages, it becomes very clear that SEO is necessary.

There are millions of websites with billions of pages. Only the top 10 web pages are listed on a Search Engine Result Page (or SERP as you may have seen it written in some text). To Google, these 10 web pages on the first page of the SERP are the most relevant and valuable results for the keywords you used for your search.

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in SEO  by Nathan O'Leary

Zemanta Review: SEO Link Building With The Zemanta Plugin

If you are a blogger you may have heard of the Zemanta plugin available for various blogging platforms such as WordPress, MoveableType, Drupal and Joomla. The plugin can also be installed on your Firefox, Chrome or IE web browser. If you haven’t used The Zemanta plugin I would highly recommend it for many different reasons, one of which is to help you build links. Zemanta is essentially a blogging coach, helping improve your writing in many different ways. As you start to write a new post, it suggests related content already on the web similar to yours to link to. It will also show you complementary pictures to embed in to your posts and will recommend popular keywords to include in your copy.  By implementing these suggestions, you should receive more traffic because you’re using popular keywords and your posts will be more engaging with good pictures so your visitors will stay on your site longer.

Zemanta as a Link Building Tool

Most SEO professionals perform their own keyword research before starting to write a new post and probably already have an idea for images, but if you don’t this is a great tool. My favorite use for the Zemanta plugin is to help me find related sites to acquire links from. I start out by creating a new blog post and pasting a list of keywords I am trying to target. Zemanta scans over the keywords and makes recommendations for similar articles from their network of sites. The articles listed in Zemanta tend to have more traffic and authority, so they make great link targets.

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in Link Building / SEO  by Nathan O'Leary

3 SEO Tools I Am Thankful for This Thanksgiving

Having automated SEO tools performing tedious and mundane tasks and providing alerts to things of which you want to be made aware, saves a SEO professional a great deal of time. Anything that saves time for me is a huge plus. Here are three SEO tools I use everyday to make my life a lot easier as a search marketer.

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in SEO  by Nathan O'Leary