Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enables your website content to be given situational context, then indexed and ranked in authority for searchers of information. I think we all know that.

But did you know…

“Prioritizing valuable content is the key ingredient to success… creating high-quality, informative content that is genuinely useful to the audience should be the priority. When content is valuable, it naturally attracts links and engagement, which ultimately boosts its search engine rankings.” -Darryl Navarrete, CEO, marketing director and SEO specialist.

Keywords or Key Information?

Keyword research is still important for understanding how people search for content in different categories, but intentional keyword stuffing is a dead practice that deserves the grave. How many times do you want to see “in New Hampshire” (or some other geo target) repeated when you read about a product or service? It doesn’t matter where you use it, and the qualification sounds silly.

The takeaway: Repetition and redundancy are enemies of SEO in 2023! Keywords should be used like strong seasoning – in the right amounts and in just the right places.

Each page on your website should have a keyword strategy. Title tags, slugs, meta descriptions and on-page content should all contain the targeted keyword (or phrase) that your audience members are using to find pertinent information. Keyword research can help here. However, be very careful about forcing keywords into your website content. Make sure they flow in naturally as in an engaging conversation.

Today’s SEO is based on natural language, contextual meaning, and quality of information so it doesn’t matter if you use more industry keywords than your competitors. If your content is well organized and more valuable to the visitors, you’ll have the SEO advantage.

The Coveted Google Page One Results

Getting on the first page of Google for keyword searches is still widely misunderstood. Page one organic search results are fiercely fought for and earned.

Unfortunately, some small business owners and marketing directors are under the impression that because they do good work and have a website designer, their business “should be” showing up on page one in Google for keyword searches. In most cases, those who make it “above the fold” have worked years to get there. They’ve invested in their businesses by building excellent, comprehensive, and valuable websites that visitors use and share with others. Maybe you’re one of them enjoying the results today.

The Reality Check with Good News

If you’re looking to improve website search results, don’t fall for the smoke and mirrors that have confused business owners and marketing directors for decades. We who understand this business, and are honest about it, are constantly fighting the false notions of which clients have been misinformed.

Everyone thinks their business has what it takes to get visible Google search results. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t.

If you do want immediate results, you can pay for inbound leads with a pay per click campaign. This gives you the advantage of fast conversions and helps you gain valuable search engine data you can apply organically.  And remember, your landing pages must be relevant and valuable to visitors, so content quality is ever important with paid campaigns.

If you want to succeed in organic SEO, know what it takes. With some care and focus on building out valuable content using a simple and focused keyword strategy, you can get better results in a matter of months or even just weeks.

To sum it all up, companies with enduring success in digital marketing “make money the old-fashioned way, they earn it!”

The post Know Your SEO in 2023 appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

You need to have your own name and hopefully links on other great websites, and we’re not talking about social media pages. We’re talking about your credentials, independently validated and promoted by respected organizations and companies.

For example, a custom builder of a featured home in an architectural magazine’s website is contacted directly by a wealthy prospect looking for artisans capable of creating similar features in her dream home. A link to the builder’s website further demonstrates to the prospect that she’s found the right construction partner.

Build up the flanks to bolster your online marketing campaigns!

I had the recent experience of noticing a slowdown of new business leads. On that very day I received an email from someone who found me through her online research. I was first found by this person on my faculty page through my affiliation with Plymouth State University. She had to read through my CV before finding my business name and then Google searching for my website, which further demonstrated our professional work. It’s a nice new opportunity for my business and we have a kick off meeting scheduled very soon.

Believe it or not, there are people who research and thoroughly read things on the internet, and take what they read seriously. If you’ve been written about on a site with much higher traffic than your own, well, that’s good right? Then get your name out there in some juicy, high traffic places like universities, respected media outlets, trade associations, established customers and the like.

Hitch your star to some high up wagons and make sure your own website experience is great when people link off the affiliate site to yours.

Specialize to better affiliate.

Developing a niche or sub-specialty in a specific industry is a great way to affiliate your brand name nationally or globally with industry leaders. People from every business category are always looking for the best quality, or that perfect-fit vendor. So I’ll close with one more example.

A local promotions company I’m familiar with took themselves out of the advertising specialties (commodity) business and positioned the brand in a couple of niche industries that happen to be easily penetrable. The product focus is very specific and now they are known nationally as leaders in this field, even though any of their thousands of competitors could readily produce the same products. Thanks to their affiliations in these industries, they are the nationally recommended suppliers and their corporate sales soar above their generalist local competitors.

If you’re really great at something, team up with the people, businesses and other organizations that you can help most. Then work reciprocally in your affiliation links to help users of your products and services find the very best of what they’re searching for.

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The evolution of organic SEO is a case study in self-regulating integrity. It has taken approximately 20 years for Google to figure out what sites are authentic and authoritative, which ones are mediocre or minimally acceptable and which are just “spam.” And believe, me, they know!

Bogus gets the boot!

Guess what Google focuses on when determining your website’s ranking? Your actual industry knowledge, the depth and veracity of your site’s content, the visitors’ user experiences, visitor interactions, shared links and referrals. Should you ever speak with someone who professes to be an “SEO expert,” and they begin confusing you with a lot of technical jargon, walk away. If instead, they discuss robust content development and ways to improve user experience, then it would be worth having a conversation with them.

In 2017, the bottom line for organic search is this: If you want good organic SEO results, you need to work hard to make sure your web content is valuable, dynamic and comprehensive for visitors. That takes creative brainpower and has nothing to do with technology.

In recent years a lot of companies wasted a lot of money on SEO services that may have shown early results but then worked against them because of “black hat” tactics such as keyword stuffing. Too much effort was expended trying to court Google (or fake them out) based on keyword and metadata veneer with little or no substance behind it. Now, you better make sure there’s valuable substance to your content and that it’s as deep as you can make it.

You know where to spend your time. Where should you spend your money?

Are you considering a search engine marketing campaign and budget? Good! Because today we have more definitive ways to drive search engine results. Any reputable web designer should build your website properly so that it’s “search engine friendly.” In 2017 this should be a given! The point is, don’t worry about the technical side of SEO or put any real money into it.

If you’re going to spend money on organic search, start with a writer who understands your industry or else pay yourself to do it (spend your own company’s manhours). The best place to put your money is exactly where Google wants you to spend it – in a Google Adwords campaign. Paid search marketing will deliver immediate results and give you extremely valuable data to keep improving the results, not only of your paid campaigns but also your organic website content, further boosting your organic SEO efforts. See the synergy?

The Old One-Two Punch

So, now you have a clear route to search engine optimization and marketing success in 2017. Spend time on content and (gulp) money on advertising! You need to be proactive on both fronts: quality web content and targeted pay-per-click advertising with a set budget that you control. You only pay for actual results – real world search clicks to your website. When those legitimate searchers land on your website, the content better darn well deliver what they want! Then you’ll be firing on all cylinders.

The post SEO 2017: Where to spend time and where to spend money appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Google gets bored and turns away from old content just like you do. That’s why their spiders or “bots” are always out crawling through websites, including yours, looking for the latest relevant information that their consumers (most people) are seeking.

What’s new? When you ask that simple question, you really do want to know the answer because what’s old is irrelevant. Is there anything less interesting than old news; stuff you seen and heard before?

Frequently updating website content tells the search engines that you are at least an active publisher of information. The more relevant the information is to your business category, and the more valuable it is to your target audience, the better Google and other search engines will rank your pages organically. Provided that your website is coded well enough, quality content is pure SEO gold.

The more often you add fresh, high quality information to your website, the more Google’s crawlers will come back around to see what’s new. As that new content is determined to be relevant and valuable to searchers, Google will index it and raise your pages’ visibility. They are looking for authoritative sites that will deliver the right information to the searcher. Freshness and frequency combined with relevance and quality build authoritative status into your website. Again, this is SEO gold!

Effective SEO is not complicated but it’s extremely competitive. Maybe we should just leave it at that.

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There are always people out there looking to make quick money with services based not on uncompromising quality but minimalism or mediocrity. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different of an industry.

I learned years ago that there is this “website designers vs. SEO” mentality. For real results, SEO must be involved throughout the entire website design process.

Whether you call the clean coding of a website good SEO practice or first-rate website development, your’re missing the boat. Does SEO include making sure the website is coded optimally? Yes, but it’s only part of the overall picture.

Having a website built by a first-rate website designer using clean code is good starting point since we can then focus on more important aspects of SEO including keyword research, keyword tracking, other On-Page SEO tactics, Off-Page SEO, and Content Creation. By having your website perfectly coded, you are only implementing one part of your SEO Strategy.

Your website is the foundation for your marketing and lead generation efforts. However, it does not by itself generate new leads for your business. It makes a good impression on people searching for you directly but great SEO is how you actually gain NEW leads online. Let’s look at myth versus fact about achieving SEO results.

Myth: “Search engine optimization is only about outranking your competitors…”

Fact: SEO is not only about outranking competitors. It is all about driving quality traffic to your site for more opportunities to make a sale. Off-Page SEO increases your rankings, but just as importantly, gains quality referral traffic to your site.

Myth: “If you have competitor websites that are doing HTML properly…they will outrank you”

What are Google’s and other popular search engines’ number one goal? Provide the most credible and relevant results to their end users.

Fact: Credibility comes from Off-Page SEO, which builds links to your site. These links,also referred to as backlinks, are seen as votes of credibility to the search engines. Google will rank a site with many credible backlinks and that is coded at a third-rate website design level well before a site without credible backlinks that is perfectly coded.

Myth: “SEO techniques are usually only required if your site has quality competition.”

Fact: Very few niches nowadays have such low amount of competition where just optimal coding can get you ranking on the first page, as optimal coding is only one aspect of the SEO lead generation strategy.

Myth: “It’s worse if the SEO staff is inside the design agency.”

Fact: Keyword research and analysis finds the profitable and accessible phrases around which to base the website’s content. This is best completed before writing even one piece of code. If you develop a site and then incorporate SEO afterwards, it’s not a true results-driven marketing or lead generation effort.

Again, web design isn’t something that generates leads or quality traffic. It is where your leads are directed to learn more and buy. SEO is the actual lead generation aspect to gain new business online.

It’s important to make sure SEO is involved from the start so that the website is built on the most profitable and accessible keyword phrases. Oftentimes a website designer without knowledge of SEO will develop a perfectly coded site that doesn’t make first page search results and therefore sits in a dark back alley of the Internet only gaining low quality traffic that never leads to any sales.

If you are in this position, then perhaps our team can recharge your lead generation.

Jon Parker is the owner of Recharged Business Solutions. On the web: www.nhleadgeneration.com  Phone: (603) 493-6344 Email: jparker@rechargedsolutions.com

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I’m in the thicket of online media every day. I’ve studied and practiced all the best practices in
social media, blogging, email and web content. I was a very early adopter of LinkedIn and Twitter, then Facebook. I’ve been doing email marketing successfully for about 7 years now.

My educated opinion is there is something very wrong with current “best practice” marketing models that will have to change at some point. Marketers may be more transparent but they’re also more full of BS than ever. It’s not intentional BS, it’s just a lot of useless information to which I’m referring as BS.

Why is this? Most marketing departments are trying to out-tweet and out-blog each other in an attempt to win the Google position race. So what happens to content? It becomes diluted and cheap, even if it does raise visibility.

Now PLEASE don’t misunderstand. There are many excellent blog writers out there sailing valiantly in the ocean of mediocrity. Much of my continuing education has been gleaned from reading good blogs. They can be entertaining and very enlightening. The perfect turn of phrase in a tweet can open up a whole new area of interest and enrichment, but finding such a tweet is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

If in doubt, leave it out!

If planned and executed well, a blogging and social share strategy can certainly raise your keyword rankings in Google. That’s great, and the planning & executing should only include high quality content.

That’s why I’ve cut back the volume of my own social shares for business. If a post doesn’t smack you with a “must see more” kind of experience, you won’t share it. If you won’t share a post or be moved by it to take action, just how effective is it?

When other people – outside your organization – enthusiastically share your content with their valued friends and connections, you’ve struck social pay dirt… if it leads to referrals and new business.

I understand the term “conversions” to include when people fill out a form on a landing page for a free E-book download. You “converted” them from an unknown human entity to a “lead” in the database. You have their email address but did you really convert them? Do they even have the capacity to be a client? Do they have relationships with potential clients?

That’s where good marketing automation OR good salesmanship comes into play to nurture the “lead” all the way to being a paying customer. However, high quality content over high quantity noise will shortcut the lead nurturing. My newsletters and blog posts generate direct sales without a lot of lead nurturing because people in the audience really like the message and therefore conclude that we can help them. People call or email a direct response requesting a meeting or proposal. Those are my key metrics.

Striving to be at the cutting edge of your industry requires cutting edge thinking, better product design, superior service models, strong and deep relationships… What else can you think of?

Being the first to re-tweet a technology advance or scoop news from a third party may be fast but it’s also quite easy. What did you and your company do to advance the technology? Why are you THE BEST re-seller of that hot new technology? If you consistently demonstrate best, you’ll be talked about with just a few well conceived and well placed posts. Others will do the volume sharing for you and your Google search rank will tend to skyrocket when that happens.

Our potential to positively affect each another through communication is enormous with the digital tools we have. We need to channel our messages in valuable ways or it’s a big waste of time. Let’s try to focus more on what really matters in business; quality work, quality relationships and growth – things worth blogging about.

The post Cheap Noise is Getting Out of Hand appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

A FREE NETWORKING EVENT to celebrate our TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY!

Thursday, May 30, 2013 – 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM

Eastpoint Executive Center – 264 South River Road Bedford, NH 03110

Create Content  to Drive New Business!

Presented by Chuck Sink Link and Eastpoint Executive Center

Please RSVP  by leaving a comment right here on this post.

You may also RSVP by contacting Chuck:  chuck@chucksink.com  |  (603) 345-7223

Come learn something valuable and make connections.  See you May 30th!

Create content that is engaging!

The post Learn and Network at the Chuck Sink Link Anniversary Event appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

By Chuck Sink

In today’s marketing world you need to be a good Content Curator (Curator, huh?)  Curating the content is also known as getting the content so if I use the word “get” instead of “curate,” forgive me. The last real curators I knew worked exclusively for museums.

Give Me an Easy Tool!

A client of mine recently asked her SEO vendor what they use to generate fresh content for the dynamic news feed on their website. What “Curator Plugin” did they use? The answer came back starting this way: “There’s no easy answer on this one…” The vendor went on to explain how they manually get (curate) articles for their news feed. “We all do a lot of reading and we share the best of what we find…” continued the answer.  That answer is one reason I respect this particular vendor so much. They are diligent specialists and very good at what they do.

The post Curate Content that Drives New Business appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The website user experience (UX) your organization purveys will either drain you or sustain you in business. Plenty of money can be spent serving up completely different experiences to your audience depending on whom you choose to design your online marketing programs. The difference to your website visitors can be dramatic! One design may have their interest soaring while the other, they find, is utterly boring. Okay…

Bouncing visitors can be very disappointing and even costly, especially if your firm spends money on Pay-Per-Click advertising. You allocate a budget for search engine marketing and get great click through rates to a dull static website with no real value or entertainment to draw visitors in to interact and take action. Or maybe the information layout is difficult to navigate and confusing so they leave the site after 2 or 3 seconds. Then you wonder why your website doesn’t seem to be doing anything for you. (Hint: It must do something for them first!)

Your website is your most valuable communication asset.

Work with a web partner that demonstrates a knowledge of user experience and information design as well as traffic generation. The author’s opinion is the horse has to come before the cart.

You have the choice to serve your online visitors or be indifferent to their experiences. Make certain your site’s UX is worthy of their time. Then go ahead and invest appropriately in traffic generating activities.

So how is your website performing these days? When people land there are they apt to explore and ask for more?

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