Innovation Simple » SEO

The Importance Of Corporate Blogs

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:42:31 +0000

Blogging is not new, however there are still a large amount of the business population that does not understand the power blogging can have for a corporation. Today we are going to go over some reasons why a company should have a corporate blog.

Here are only a few reasons on why a company should have a corporate blog:

Fresh content for users
Fresh content for search engines
Ability grow company’s website faster
Ability to allow for more interaction from users
Ability to show company’s authority and knowledge
Company’s that blog more frequently statistically get more traffic
More opportunities to network with fellow bloggers
Ability to get more pages indexed for certain keywords in the search engines
Ability to have RSS Feeds so people can subscribe to your content
A lot of blogging software has search capabilities allowing websites to have search boxes
Ability to syndicate content
And many more…

I see so many companies these days who want to increase their online presence in the search engines, however they do not like the fact that they have to continue to grow the size of the website by adding content on a frequent basis. To all business owners or managers this is a notice that if you want to have some real success online you have to grow the size of your site on a frequent basis.

Imagine if you are the business owner and you along with your entire staff decided to take off a month, 6 months, a year or even several years from working, how successful would that business be.

This is exactly what businesses do with their websites, they build them once and forget about them. To often websites are used as “oh I guess we should have one of those, lets build a small one with a couple of pages” and then the business in the same breath says we want to show up in the search engines. There is a big discrepancy in realistic expectations of what business owners want and the plans they implement to get them.

If you want your business to grow, your must grow you website!

Innovation Simple is a premier custom blog development company that can turn your company’s website from a small static website to a living breathing corporate blog.

Local SEO – How To Get More Local Citations

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:55:36 +0000

When performing Local SEO (search engine optimization) or as some say the art of getting ranked higher in Google Maps there are several things that you have to do and one of them is to get citations. Citations are resources or when some other site lists your company or mentions your company.

Here are some ways to build citations to improve Local SEO:

Local Directories

Local directories are a great place to start because a lot of cities will have directories that people have built for that particular location. A good way to find some of the local directories is to go to Google and search your keyword city directories and that will pull a list of results of specific directories around your city.

Local Blogs

Everyone has a blog these days and companies that are serious abut their online rankings and exposure blog frequently as well. Finding local bloggers in your city can be a great network to tap into and get citations and links from. Bloggers like to write about cool things, news, tips, tricks and anything else they can think of.

Try to find bloggers in your city who blog about your type of industry or the more influential social butterfly bloggers as well.

Local Search Engines

Local search engines often work together by crawling each others databases to make sure theirs is up to date. For example Localeze and Infousa crawl each other. This is why sometimes you will find a business listing that looks the same on one site as is on another local search engine site. You want to make sure your company is listed in them.

Superpages, Yelp, Insiderpages, Yellowpages, Judy’s Book and Open List are just a few of the local search engines that you will want to list your company’s profile.

Look At Competitors Citations

A good place to find where to get some citations is by looking at competitors citations that are in their local profiles. When you see where they are getting citations from you can see that they may be good places for your company to get citations from.

Industry Focused Directories and Blogs

A normal art of doing link building for an SEO campaign is to find directories that are specific to your industry. When doing Local SEO you will still want to find directories and blogs that are specific to your industry and list your company and try to get links from. Remember your main mission is to find places online that mention your company.

Getting links from other related sites can help build your online presence and are places that the search engines crawl. They can find these mentions and links about your company which will help them want to give more reputation to your company.

Conclusion

When you are trying to find places to get citations from you want to think local, local, and local. Local directories, local blogs, local search engines and local everything. Finding places where you can list your business profile is always a potential.

Contact Innovation Simple if you are in need of performing Local SEO for your business.

SEOMoz New Web App In Beta

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:50:55 +0000

SEOMoz.org has released a new web app that will help to track the marketing campaigns for websites. This is the first step in making all of the SEOMoz tools available all in one platform instead of having to use multiple tools in different place to extract the data.

The new web app is in beta and is only available to Pro Members obviously. While there will still be bugs that need to be fixed this is an application that will improve over time as more data is pulled when people run reports. Here are some screenshots of the new web app:

See all of your campaigns:

This is an overview on your campaign:

An important feature is the ability for the app to detect crawl errors and find pages that may have errors. This saves a lot of time as it can take a long time to check every page on a website for errors:

A new edition to the web app will be the on page grading tool which will take over the old term target tool:

Link Analysis Features:

This is a good step in the right direction of having a piece of SEO software that is more of a platform of all tools in one instead of having multiple tools in multiple places. This should help streamline some of the problems of managing seo.

All images are courtesy of SEOMoz.org.

Greet Box Wordpress Plugin

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:03:59 +0000

There are many many reasons on why to use Wordpress and here is just another one of those reasons. Personalization is a big topic these days on the internet especially when it comes to making your website users feel a closer connection with you. Today I found a great Wordpress plugin that incorporates more personalization into your site.

The plugin is called WP Greet Box and it will provide a message to visitors to your website who found your website through various means. So if you have a new user who has never been to your website it will ask them to subscribe to your RSS Feed or it will ask them if they want to find other related resources on your website that can help them with what they are looking for.

Here is a screenshot of the Google greet box:

As you can see it will greet your new user adding a little personal touch along with a Call To Action for them to subscribe to your RSS Feed. It will also have a link to related information on your site:

Having a custom message that can be more targeted specifically to your customers can increase readership and loyalty as all bloggers know that is what they have to do. Since blogging is so important these days in getting more traffic to your business I would recommend that all webmasters try to add as much personalization to their websites as possible.

This plugin is compatible with all cache plugins enabling the plugin to run at optimal speed and not being a hinder on your websites load time.

Google Chrome Mozbar

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:14:11 +0000

SEOMoz.org is one of the world’s authority websites when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization) and they have now become more focused on providing SEO tools and information. One of those tools is the Mozbar which is a toolbar in your browser which will show several SEO metrics and analytics. Mozbar has only been in Firefox and now it is available in Google Chrome.

There is a lot of information and resources of links to look up data on a website. My favorite part about the Mozbar is the page analysis. Here is a quick snapshot of what you can see:

Due to the way Google Chrome renders page content the SEOMoz Mozbar has a new feature where you can move the mozbar to the bottom of the page, that way if you want other toolbars to still show up at the top you can have both toolbars open. I like this because you can have both the SEOQuake toolbar and Mozbar in view just like you can when they are in Firefox.

11 Elements To Website Conversions

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:39:21 +0000

CRO (conversion rate optimization) is being talked about more these days online and is making some headway into marketing companies, especially internet marketing companies.

If you have a website you want it to perform in whatever way that it is supposed to whether it be to have people know how to contact you, to sell things, to promote your services or to just plain generate more leads for your company.

There are several things you can do to make a website perform better and there are literally thousands of blog posts, articles, and guides out there that will teach website owners how to improve their websites. You can improve a website in regards to web design, web development, search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, website usability testing and more.

This whitepaper lists some basic things you can do to make a website perform better in having it do what you want to do as well as broadcasting better trust with its visitors who use the site.

This FREE whitepaper will show you:

how to identify design mistakes
how to identify navigation errors
how to build better credibility
how to improve calls to action
and more

Download 11 Elements to Website Conversions today and make your website perform at a higher level!

New Beginner’s Guide To SEO From SEOMoz

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:52:14 +0000

SEOMoz is one the best seo companies in the world and has over the years pretty much become the authority on SEO information and tools. They have a ton of free content that you can learn from. Along with their blog they have a pro membership that can give you more information and tools. One of their best guides they have put out is their Beginner’s Guide To SEO.

Download the pdf and read some of the best SEO advice around. My favorite chapter is #3 which talks about why search engine marketing is necessary.

Here is a layout of the chapters in the guide:

How search engines operate
How people interact with search engines
Why search engine marketing is necessary
The basics of search engine friendly design and development
Keyword research
How usability, experience, & content affect rankings
Growing popularity and links
Search engine tools and services
Myths and misconceptions about search engines
Measuring and tracking success

Innovation Simple In Top 1.63% Of Websites

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:23:54 +0000

Alexa is a company that continually monitors where a website stands in comparison to other websites that are on the web. I was doing some research this morning and did a quick glimpse into Alexa and found that the website innovationsimple.com was ranked 507,012 which is in the top 1.63% of the websites that are online.

I got this info as I was looking at a tool from Hubspot they call Website Grader. Here is a quick snapshot of what a report card from Website Grader will look like:

The report will grade a website on a 100 scale and then give you a score. Innovationsimple.com scored a 92 out of 100 which is not bad. No matter who you are running this type of report on your website is worth it.

Ranking Factors From Rand Fishkin

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:21:39 +0000

Mike McDonald from Web Pro News interviewed the CEO of SEOmoz.org, Rand Fishkin, at the 2010 SMX Advanced in Seattle where they talked about search engine ranking factors and what the search engines are really looking at. Rand covers some of the seo myths that are still out there like keyword density and h1 tags.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MJpWFOfn9A

This is really good information and goes to show that search engines still do rely heavily on the amount and type of links that point into a page. Rand continues to explain that it is not only the amount of links, but the unique domains of where those links are coming from. There is a big correlation between websites that rank well and the number of unique domains with inbound links.

SEO is continually changing, yet Rand says that a lot of the basic seo principles and activities that we did 3 and 4 years ago still work today.

How Does Google Really Work

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:44:16 +0000

Many people know what search engines are and the #1 search engine in the world called Google. However there are many people that I have talked to that really do not understand how a search engine works. I found a video that has Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, showing in a simplistic way of how Google works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs

There are 3 main parts to a search engine:

Crawler
Index
Serving Results

Most people only know about the serving results as they are able to search for things and then see the search engine results page where they can see the listings. Hopefully this will give you some more insight into what is really happening in the backend of a search engine.