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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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:
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.
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.
Social Bookmarking is similar to bookmarking websites on your personal computer, but it is visible to anyone. The more people that bookmark the same website, the more votes that website receives and the more popular it becomes. Many times your content can go viral, if it receives enough votes and is promoted to the front page. Social bookmarking should be an essential part of your link building strategy. Just make sure the social bookmarking site you are submitting your content to, does not place a “no follow tag” on your bookmarked links. When the social bookmarks are “followed links”, they will count as a back link to your content and help your content get indexed frequently and even help you rank organically in the search engines. There are many social bookmarking sites available such as DIGG, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz and Stumbleupon. Make sure the site that you submit your content to receives a decent amount of traffic, has active users and, once again, will follow your links.
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.