Tag Archives: Website Traffic

Social Interaction Tips for Your Website in 2013

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By optimizing your site for social interaction, you’ll find your online audience more engaged and interested in your brand all across the Web.  You will also find that the major search engines will be more attentive to your website and you can expect improved rankings.  Here are some tips that will help your website to get more social interaction:

Social Media Icons

Link to Your Pages on the Biggest Social Networks
You must create well-developed and personalized profiles on Facebook, Google +, Twitter and Linked In. You must have links to these social profiles on your homepage in the form of social sharing buttons like Facebook “Like” and Google + “+1”. You can even create a space on your home page to show the latest Facebook and Twitter posts if you are very active on these platforms.  If you have a social network that is a direct match for your vertical (eg. Green Energy for a Solar Energy Firm), be sure to include that as well.

Blog Posting
We all know that interesting and relevant blog posts can increase website traffic, create greater social engagement, social interaction and more opportunities to display your industry expertise. Social sharing buttons in your blog posts allow visitors to share your content and increase your sphere of online influence. Google Authorship can also help to increase the online audience that will find your blog content.

Make It Easy to Login and Interact With Your Website
If you have significant website traffic, you should consider adding social login functionality, which allows users to simply sign into one of their social network profiles (usually Facebook or Twitter) and then use that identity to engage with your website. This should help to increase the number of visitors that have a social interaction with your site while they’re just stopping by.

Create Unique and Interesting Content
Some users like to read, others are visual learners, so do not be afraid to use a combination of text and video to share your website content.  Use your analytics to track the most popular mediums by number of visitors over time to determine what format is most effective for your online audience.

Encourage Sharing and Interaction
Don’t be afraid to ask questions and invite comments at the end of a blog post, or asking users to share your content with others via social media. Users are going to be more willing to interact with you and other visitors on your website if you put yourself out there and let them know you’re listening.  You may not always get positive feedback, but blogging is like life, anything that doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger.

Bottom Line:  Blogging and Social Interaction is hard work.  Most small business owners do not have the time to devote to this part of their marketing plan. It is important to find content writers/bloggers or employees who are willing to embrace this part of your marketing plan and help to move it ahead. I would love to hear from any business owners out there who have creative solutions to tackling the daunting task of keeping a blog and social media content fresh and interactive.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner In Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California, SMO, SEO and Website Development Firm.

Internal Planning Tips for Successful SEO

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According to allbusiness.com, marketing channels are defined as “avenues used by marketers to make products available to consumers. Wholesalers, distributors, sales agents, retailers, and all other sources used in getting the product to consumers are included in the category of marketing channels.”

Solid white hat SEO practices can improve the search engine placement of your website, but the marketing messages come from your website, social media accounts, blog posts and online ads. SEO can increase website traffic and awareness of your products and services, but cannot directly sell your products. Therefore, SEO is a traffic generation tool, and not a marketing channel.As a traffic generation tool, SEO is powerful, but to be successful, you need to integrate the traffic into the marketing channels that already exist for your firm. If every SEO client embraced this approach, they would increase the return on investment received from their SEO efforts. The following are some tips on how to accomplish this within your firm:

Get Input from Different Departments

The CEO of each firm needs to make company-wide input into the SEO process mandatory. Sales will know which products bring customers to the firm, Accounting will know which products or services are the most profitable, production or manufacturing will know which products lend themselves to increased production. Every department should have a say in the SEO strategy and keyword choices to ensure that the right customers are being reached to consider the correct products that will maximize profitability. Don’t be afraid to include input to SEO strategy into job descriptions.

Do the Small Stuff

Social Media has become so important as a tool to share valuable information, and social signals have become a significant factor in SEO. Do your signs and business cards carry the company website address or Twitter address? Do your sales presentations or brochures include website info, Facebook Fan Page, and the Twitter address and invite potential customers to follow? Find ways for your team to contribute to SEO and online marketing.

Motivate and Educate Your Team

Establish online goals and share the tracking of these goals with your team. Train those working closest with SEO in basic Local SEO Services, and include them in planning and discussions.

Putting education first creates ownership of the success of your SEO efforts and willn make conversations about SEO strategy more participatory and productive.

Let Your SEO Team in on “The Plan”

Your sales team knows what new product offerings are coming for weeks or months in advance. It takes time to plan, create marketing materials, and coordinate production schedules. The SEO Team should be planning SEO strategies, helping to create relevant content and implementing strategy during this time. Solid SEO decision making requires time to plan.

Bottom Line: Integrating your SEO team, whether internal or external, into your business planning is a solid business practice. Ensuring that your SEO team accepts input into planning from all departments of your company is a necessity. Organic SEO does not change and work as quickly as PPC and other methods of attracting online traffic. Organic SEO does, in the eyes of most web marketers, provide the best quality website traffic, so the planning and hard work necessary to improve Search Engine Positioning are worth the effort.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, A Santa Rosa, California based SEO, Online Marketing, and Website Development Firm.

 

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