TopRank Internet Marketing News

Each industry and company offers a different perspective but in cases where you operate in a less consumer driven industry there are ways to highlight your corporate culture and benefits to your targeted audience.

You can take advantage of the search capabilities of Twitter to find specific keywords in tweets to monitor the industry and look for the right opportunities to share your expertise. Connect at the right time when a potential customer is expressing a need or desire for the products you offer. Provide the customer with answers and support to resolve a problem and you could be looking at a sale or a new advocate for your company.

A common misperception in regards to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program is that its value is derived solely from traffic generated from Google.  Traffic from smaller search engines, such as Yahoo! and Bing, holds so little value that it may as well not exist.

Just as no upstanding SEO professional would ever state that Yahoo! and Bing traffic is the primary objective of an SEO program, no upstanding SEO professional would ever state that Google traffic is the only objective of an SEO program.

In reality, traffic from all sources can bring measurable SEO value.

As with most questions, the one at the title of this post has the potential to be fairly loaded.

In an ideal world, your blog will exist on your domain – benefiting from all the authority that you’ve worked to build up on your website – and lending the authority that you will work to build up on your blog back to your website.  Just as two good people enter a marriage and become a great couple, a website and blog married on the same domain is an ideal solution.

A more common variation of this question would be, ‘do rankings still matter?’

The answer to this would be, of course they still do.  Traditional search rankings are simply no longer the be-all, end-all of a successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program.

Ten years ago, search rankings consisted of ten basic website links that were (essentially) the same regardless of where in the world you were searching from.

Rankings nowadays can be affected by everything from:

• Local, influenced by the geographic location of your IP address
• Social, influenced by the emergence or disappearance of trending topics

Yes, of course.

For many, a straight-forward ‘yes’ when answered in relation to whether a mobile Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy should be launched is a terrifying answer.

Quite simply, if search moves at the speed of light, mobile moves at the speed of light on [insert favorite energy drink here.]

When something moves this fast, there are bound to be those that feel woefully behind in terms of understanding.

If you are trying to best a competitor’s success, you should definitely do exactly what they do.  Borrow their site structure, use their keywords and blog about what they blog about.  Then, when they go out of business, you’ll be right there to take over.

Now that you’ve been weakened with sarcasm, it’s time to accept the hard truth.  You may or may not best the success of a competitor that is exponentially farther ahead of you in digital marketing channels.  But one surefire recipe for failure is to try to walk directly in your competitor’s footsteps.

Imagine you were the enlightened caveman (or woman) who invented the wheel.  How would you drum up demand for your new product – by promoting your newly coined phrase ‘wheel’ or by promoting a solution for traveling and dragging?

Today’s start-ups would be wise to heed to this analogy.

Until the product or service you create has its name ingrained in the minds of your target, there is very little chance they will find you regardless of how badly they need you.  It doesn’t matter that everyone needs a ‘pilotguide’ (a fictional and foolproof autopilot for your car) if no one knows to ask for a pilotguide by name.

Chances are you have recently come into contact with microformats without even being aware of it.  Essentially, microformats are ways to highlight key areas on a website to make it easier for this information to be read by machines (see: search engines).

Contact information and customer reviews are two key areas in which microformats are commonly used.  Most intriguingly, these particular microformats are often used in support of ‘rich snippets’.  Rich snippets (think customer reviews displayed in search results) make it easier for search engines to highlight some of your more compelling web content for users.

Online reputation management is equally important for businesses, highly visible executives and even team members.  As business becomes increasingly digital, online brand reputation quickly becomes a real world reputation.

It’s been reported that over 50% of adults Google each other and over 90% of B2B buyers use search when starting the buying process.  In other words:  if your brand has online reputation issues, they will be discovered.

Below, find two proactive approaches that can help protect – and in case of emergency – defend your brand:

For many businesses, search engine rankings and traffic are simply KPIs supporting larger online marketing goals – inquiries and sales. While these businesses may have tracking systems in regards to online sales, and may be tracking web stats via analytics, it can be difficult to bridge the gap between the two.

Analytics goals and funnels help to bridge this gap, showing how visitors convert into a sale based on factors including:

• Keyword
• Referring source
• Landing page

So why is it important to track this data?