I was recently contacted by a reader who stumbled across this blog searching for help in improving his manufacturing company’s search engine ranking. Having started my web copywriting career as a contract writer for several SEO firms and professionals, I have a fair understanding of the basic mechanics of SEO. As I explained to the reader over the phone earlier this week, the basics are most important – things like choosing competitive keywords, keyword placement and link building strategies still matter considering the fact that the rules are constantly changing when it comes to SEO.

After explaining to him that I was not an SEO consultant per say – I simply happen to be a web copywriter and content marketing specialist with an  SEO background (a big distinction, really), I encouraged him to focus his efforts on content marketing to make other companies more aware of the products he provides. This strategy will result build his expert status, brand recognition and produce valuable back links. At the core of this plan is the development of lots of high quality, educational, engaging content. Here are a few of the suggestions I offered:

Whitepapers, eBooks and Special Reports

Whitepapers and ebooks work very well if you’re targeting the B2B market. The content they contain involves a very strategic method of very subtly persuading the customer to purchase your product or service. The document should clearly reveal how your product or service will solve a specific problem. Its message should focus on a specific audience recognizing their concerns and showing just how uniquely your product will help solve their problem. Include images, tables, charts and other graphics for visual appeal. Free whitepapers and ebooks make great opt-in give-aways to help build your list.

Online Press Release and News Outlet Websites

Lots of  businesses are overlooking the benefits of distributing press releases to online news organizations and PR websites. This is an excellent link building technique that can attract more traffic to your website. There are quite a few free distribution websites available, and don’t forget to include local media sources.

Blogs

Blogging is a great way to build link backs. Creating concise, quality content is the key to developing reader interest. You should also spend time building your blog’s reputation and developing relationships with other bloggers through blog commenting, and of course encouraging discussions on your own blog. It’s a lot of work, but it can help you build high quality links, your audience and your reputation as a valuable blog in your industry.

Participating in Community and Industry Forums

When I ask many of my clients whether or not they participate in industry specific forums, the majority answer “no.” I can understand – forum posting can seem like a tedious activity to some. It does take time and effort to make the commitment to do so, but if you target communities that would be the most interested in the product or service you sell, you might be pleasantly surprised at the increased traffic you receive. Forum posting is another great way to build quality links.

When it comes to content marketing, the goal is planning the best strategies for your business that will bring you increased recognition as an expert, online visibility and move you higher up in the search engine ranking more quickly.

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One of my favorite writing services to provide for clients is “ghost blogging.” I love learning all about a business and brainstorming topics and ideas that capture the interest of the intended audience. I like delivering the kind of information that sparks a meaningful conversation.

The benefits of blogging for businesses is clear – even B2B businesses. Blogging can bring you more visibility, traffic and operates as an inexpensive CMS – it’s a very affordable and effective promotional tool. Plus, Google loves the way blogging regularly generates fresh content resulting in an added SEO boost. Blogging can become a core part of your B2B marketing strategy.

You can easily establish a blog with little to no initial investment. Many businesses are starting to recognize how blogging can boost website traffic, enhance their brand and bottom line with the right strategy. Having clear objectives makes it easier to meet your B2B blogging goals:

Know Your Target Market

Your blog posts should be focused on your target market. Each message should speak directly to them and supply them with the information they’re looking for.

Consider your audience’s industry and the tone of your posts. Are your readers technically savvy? Is it okay to use a more formal tone and industry jargon, or would they respond better to a lighter, friendly, conversational tone?

Decide on a Blog Promotion Campaign

You can deliver the most informative, thought provoking posts, but it won’t do you a bit of good if no one’s around to read them. So how will you go about attracting loyal readers? A few simple strategies to get you started:

•    Optimizing your content with targeted, long-tail keywords
•    Commenting on other relevant blogs
•    Sharing links to your posts through Social Media

Remain Clear about Why You Blog

You’re blogging to get more business, and that’s okay as long as you don’t turn every blog post into a blatant and annoying sales pitch.

Your blog should take on a “soft sales” approach. You’re establishing yourself as a valuable industry resource, cultivating trust and pre-selling them on your product/service. Just keep things subtle.

Monitor Stats

Start using analytic tools to help you keep track of important stats like how many visitors are reading your blog, which posts are getting read the most and which topics invite the most discussion. This information can help you fine tune your blog and your promotional campaign.

Engage in Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Technorati, Digg and StumbleUpon make it easy to expand your readership. Mention your social media activity on your blog from time to time as well.

Keep the Content Coming

One of the biggest challenges business blogs encounter is keeping posts up to date. Developing content seven, five or even three days a week takes a lot of time, but it’s important to keep your readers supplied with fresh, interesting content.

You can outsource your content to a professional ghost writer for blog management purposes. All you have to do is supply the topics, keywords and other pertinent information and the writer supplies the content. It’s that simple.  A blog that continuously delivers timely content keeps readers interested and shows them you’re serious about your business.

Stick to the standard format

There is a standard format you should stick to when writing press releases. It starts with “IMMEDIATE RELEASE” in the upper left hand corner. The next line of copy beneath it reads, “XXXX.” One the next line appears the date, city and state and the title of the press release. The title should be interesting enough to draw readers in.

Right after the title, and before the press release story, you should provide an engaging summary of no more than two sentences. It should give readers an idea of the story, but not reveal so much information that they don’t continue reading. Also, keep your press release one page long, double spaced if possible.

Answer: who, what, where why, when, how

Answering these basic questions is the cornerstone of news writing. Start with the most important information which should be your lead sentence. All information that follows supports the lead sentence and provides important details. This is known in journalism as the pyramid method of writing.

Write in a clear, easy to understand style. Maintain active voice throughout the content. Avoid selling your product or service to your readers. Remember the point of your release is to strictly inform; but if you do a good job with the copy there will be a soft sell element automatically.

Optimize your copy

This is not so important if you are only distributing your press release to print publication and media outlets, but if you are distributing online a few SEO techniques could give you an edge in the search engine results.

Avoid resorting to old school keyword stuffing. The release should read naturally so including your keywords in the title, opening sentence, last sentence and including a couple of targeted keyword phrases two or three times in the body should be enough.

Proofread and edit before distributing

Run spell check, but go through the copy manually to double check for those errors spell check often overlooks. If you’re writing strictly for web distribution, keep sentences and paragraphs short and tight for online scanning. Check grammar, punctuation and accuracy of the facts being presented. Remember the finished product represents your business, so put your best foot forward.

Photo Credit: Greg Gaskill

Local businesses like dental practices or restaurants have traditionally avoided putting much effort into creating an online presence. The assumption has been “why put effort into reaching people in other locations when we only service the local community?”

The fact is that many consumers are learning about local businesses through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Social media has created a significant ripple in the Internet marketing waters, and it’s not going anywhere. If you’re not participating in social media, you’re missing out on building relationships and recognition with consumers within your local community. Getting started is much easier than you think.

Get Started

The best thing to do is jump in and establish a professional profile that best represents your business. Include your business name, address and phone number. Many experts say that it’s best to use an actual photo of yourself to show the human side of your business; but if you prefer to use your logo for brand recognition that’s fine too.

If you’re completely new to social networking it can be a little intimidating in the beginning. There are social media consulting services that can recommend tools, resources and help you develop a clear strategy for using these sites for best results.

Be Consistent

Part of your marketing strategy when using social networking sites should be to establish brand identity. It’s important that you consistently use the same business name, address, phone number, url and photo as you build your identity. Use the exact same information on other social media site. Consistency will make it much easier for consumers to locate you, engage with you and trust you; and we all know that people do business with people they trust.

Engage in the Conversation

The biggest mistake many businesses do on social media sites is constantly promote their product or service. Consider that these sites are known as social media sites for a reason. The main idea is to socialize and share valuable information, however, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t always engage in these sites with a strategic focus.

A good rule of thumb: 80-percent of your time should be spent engaging others, sharing helpful information and helping others spread the good work about what they do. 20-percent of your time should be spent promoting your business.

The Mobile Search Advantage

More and more consumers use mobile search to access social media and locate information about local businesses. The mobile marketing platform is expected to explode thanks to conveniences like the growing number of iPhone apps and location-based services like Gowalla, Google Latitude Foursquare and others. Foursquare’s presence on Twitter is a perfect example. Twitter users can now “check in” and reveal their location. This makes it so much easier for a local business to target consumers based on location.

Social media marketing can yield impressive results for local businesses if you employ the right strategy.

This post was inspired by Christine O’Kelly’s series discussing keyword research. It’s an important part of optimization. Choosing the right keywords increases your website or blog’s visibility. Christine makes an excellent observation when she states that many people go about keyword research all wrong. They choose words or phrases that are very broad with so much competition that getting on the first page of Google seems impossible. Here are some simple tips to help you choose the best keywords for SEO:

Focusing On Long-Tail Keywords

Many people choose short-term keywords instead of long-tail ones. Here’s a quick explanation: short-term keywords are common one or two word phrases that are commonly typed into search engines to search online for information. There are too many others competing to use the same terms so it makes it much harder for you to stand out.

Choose Your Keywords

Use the keyword tool like Google Adwords, Wordtracker, or whichever tool you prefer, to search for long-tail terms. These are phrases that are usually made up of between three to five words. For example, “online blogs” is a short-tail keyword phrase that’s extremely general, whereas “how to make money with a real estate blog” is a long-tail term that’s much more specific. It only applies to a much smaller audience, but this is a good thing because it’s a very targeted phrase. People with real estate blogs looking for ways to earn money from blogging will be interested. Of course the success of the phrase depends on competition for the word.

Make sure that you still consider your target market when choosing your keywords. Think about the phrases that will attract readers in your market: what are their problems? What do they care about? What will make their lives easier?

Check for Competition

Collect a list of possible long-tail phrases – at least 10-15 phrases. Take one of your phrases and enter it into Google’s search engine with quotation marks (“) on each side and click “search. Look over to the right hand of the screen for the words “Results 1-10.” The number next to it shows the number of optimized sites the keyword phrase you entered. For best result choose long-tail keywords that show a rank of less than 6,000 for best results. That means you’ll only be competing with 6,000 other websites for the same phrase.

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If you already have a blog for your business, and deliver a steady supply of fresh, interesting content to your readers, you’re definitely on the right track. You already know that blogging is a great way of promoting your product or service and building brand recognition.  Once you’ve established a regular blogging routine, it’s time to begin applying focused strategies that will improve your blog’s search engine position.

Interlinking is one method.
An example of interlinking is taking a recent blog post and linking to a previous, relevant post in the archives.  There are two notable benefits of using this technique: 1) it exposes your readers to more of your content so that they spend more time on your site; and 2) internal links count as SEO just like backlinks from an external site do – although they are not as powerful.

The anchor text that you use to interlink your posts should be a keyword rich, targeted phrase. Don’t interlink using a nondescript phrase like “click here.”

It’s good to take the time to create internal links on a regular basis. You can take one day a couple of times a year and spend an hour, or two, interlinking your most relevant posts.  If you’ve never done this, or haven’t done it lately, take time to go through some of your older entries and find the ones that can be interlinked.

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Many people find themselves either confused by search engine optimization (SEO) or clinging to the old ways of optimizing websites. You already know that applying SEO techniques to your website helps improve online visibility by getting your site ranked higher in the search engines; but what the important rule to remember about SEO is that there are no constant rules. If you come across an SEO expert claiming guaranteed results, quickly run the other way.

The SEO landscape is constantly changing, and the Google algorithms remain a complete mystery to most of us. Understanding some of the most common myths can help you achieve the SEO results you want.

1) Keyword Meta Tags are Vital for Top Search Engine Ranking

Google does not take keyword meta tags into account when it comes to search engine ranking; therefore keyword meta tags won’t help you reach the coveted top 10 search results. However, Yahoo! does use keyword meta tags to determine search engine ranking.

It’s important to recognize that not all web users are relying on Google to find the information they need on the web. There are some search engines that do still include keyword tags into their algorithms.

2) Meta Descriptions must be a Certain Length

Once upon a time SEO experts advised that meta tag descriptions needed to fit into a certain length because the search engine results only showed a few lines of content highlighted by the website owner. This is no longer the case. Google’s algorithm automatically chooses matching text on a page that is related to the search query. The meta description that shows up in Google’s search engine results will display selected content, so it’s a good idea to do some keyword research when preparing your content.

3) Your Content Needs a Specific Keyword Density

In the early days of SEO, the experts relied heavily on using a specific keyword percentage in content for optimization. After a while it seems search engine spiders picked up on this pattern and as a result keyword density no longer guarantees a top search engine ranking.

Keywords are still important in SEO, but the percentage that they appear in content is not. The search engines favor quality, relevant content over density.

4) Search Engines Hate Flash Websites

Web experts used to tell their clients that search engines would not index Flash websites. Even though that’s no longer the case, there is still a noticeable different in the search engine results for a Flash website versus a content rich web page because there’s less you can do to optimize Flash. You can overcome this SEO hurdle by building high authority links.

5) Submitting Your Site to Dozens of Directories Gets Desired Results

You might think that it’s a good idea to submit your website to several different directories, even if they’re unrelated. The problem is that even if four out of 12 sites are actually related to your website, all of the other unrelated sites create spam links that will reflect badly on your site. The best thing to do is focus on building high quality links from sites that get good traffic from people who would actually be interested in the product or service you offer.

To get the best SEO results for your business, educate yourself, set clear goals and spend time putting your SEO campaign into action. As you put your plan into action you’ll start seeing which SEO techniques work best.

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