SEO

Blogging for Business Growth

Like many trends online blogs have certainly come of age, in fact following on from the latest Google algorithm updates business blogs should fare well in search engine results pages, or rather that should read quality regularly updated blogs will do well in the search results.

Business blogs should go hand in hand no matter what service you provide or product you sell. Blogs have many benefits and enable you to showcase your expertise within your field.

Blogs that are regularly updated with well written original content targeting key phrases gain popularity not just with visitors who keep returning to read the latest posts but with search engines, Google is well known for liking fresh quality content which leads to an increase in ranking positions within the search engines which you guessed it leads to more visitors, more visitors to your blog equals more sales.

How Does A Blog Help My Business

Having a blog for your business increase brand awareness, getting your name known via a blog will lead to increased social media noise around your brand and the services you offer. You can further push your brand name exposure by linking your blog and business Twitter account together so new blog posts automatically appear as tweets.

Link your blog to your primary website, use your blog to talk about new products and services with visitors and offer clear calls to action should they wish to go through to your transactional website and become a customer. Not only are your own links from your blog to your main site counted as backlinks which it’s no secret  that the search engines use these as a ranking factor for results page position but more importantly visitors to your blog will want to link to your content because it’s so informative and useful!

Broaden the subject matter, if your transaction website is within a tight niche you can stretch the subject matter out on the blog to a higher level which gives you more content to write about and review along with many other opportunities to rank for search terms that you otherwise wouldn’t without a blog.

Encourage guest bloggers to submit articles to your blog in return for them getting their name better known within the niche and allowing them to gain a few backlinks to their site in return for each post. The benefit to you is more fresh content in the eyes of the search engine spiders.

Test new ideas, thinking of selling a new product but unsure how the market will react, use your blog for market research, encourage feedback and comments from visitors, put a poll or survey on your blog, but remember to publish the results or findings, after all it’s all fresh original content. 

How to Gain SEO Results from LinkedIn

First of all if you and your company do not have LinkedIn presences then you’re missing a real treat, for professionals and businesses it is the social networking platform available on the internet today.

Those of you that have a LinkedIn profile already and use it for lead generation and connecting with prospects well done, but I am sure you wouldn’t complain if your leads generated via LinkedIn grew by 20% over the next couple of months and all it would take is a few hours work to see some initial benefits. 

Want even more new business out of LinkedIn?

Ok, no problem, it’s all yours and all it takes is commitment and dedicated time, once you accept LinkedIn as another marketing channel for your business, embrace it and the phones will be ringing and your order book will be bursting at the seams.

LinkedIn SEO Tips

So let’s assume you’re all fired up now to take on the business community via LinkedIn, great but just remember back to the early days of the internet when everyone (including Del Boy) thought they could build a quick 5 page website and be a millionaire by Christmas, what I am trying to say is just because it’s there doesn’t mean anyone will find it who doesn’t already know you. Here’s where our top SEO tips for LinkedIn come in, nothing fancy or technical all do-able in an afternoon.

Fully Complete your Profile – sounds obvious really but so many people don’t or if they do it’s not been given any thought, search engines crawl LinkedIn so optimise your profile for the key phrases you wish to be found for. If you’ve worked at related companies in the past then add these to your profile, again give the content some thought for search ranking benefits.

Still part of profile completion but worth a separate mention are specialities and website links as both of these are indexed by Google, think of them as keywords.

What even more SEO Benefit from LinkedIn?

Customise your url, providing it’s not already taken you can edit the url of your public profile to contain either your personal name or company dependent on which profile your editing, an alternative would be to use a keyword rich LinkedIn url e.g.  www.linkedIn/myproduct

Look for groups in your sector or consider starting one, start contributing as a way of building your profile and reputation within your sector. The SEO benefit here is about your name being associated to the group names which are often keyword rich.

Connect and network, look for ex colleagues and friends, all the people you meet during the course of going about your business, each time you quote for a job or have an enquiry ask the person to connect even if they don’t do business with you today they may in the future or quite often one of their contacts will be in touch. If you’re a frequenter of events and seem to collect a pocket full of business cards at the end of the day, why not message them through LinkedIn to thank them for talking to you and request they connect. Connecting to others will increase your exposure online and is a great way to build genuine backlinks to your business.

By taking one’s time to complete a good solid personal and company profiles will reap benefits and visitor’s levels to these profiles will increase, so be clear about who you are and what you do.

A final note about SEO benefits of LinkedIn harks back again to the early internet days, you have to keep updating your profile, add value though and don’t treat it like your Facebook page, after all would you want a potential client to know what you did at the weekend. Use a dedicated Twitter account to automatically update your LinkedIn profile is an ideal way of pushing your product or services and can be a great way of driving visitors through to your site, just remember this is a B2B networking site so don’t bombard your connections with spam offers and promotions every 15 minutes.

If you would like more information on how a correctly optimised set of LinkedIn profiles could increase your bottom line get in touch today for a chat with the leading search marketing agency in Lincolnshire.

Flash

Flash is a powerful programming tool that is unfortunately used in completely the wrong way. It is ideal for making pretty little animations, and cool logos etc. The problems occurs when full websites are made from flash. The problem is that as well as requiring special add on software to view it, and plenty of users either don’t have it, can’t be bothered installing it or are not allowed to – in work environments for example, where a massive chunk of personal Internet use is done. However it gets worse, search engines really don’t like flash based sites. They can treat them as almost empty sites, with no navigation, no content and no search results….or traffic. The search engines are making progress with understanding flash websites and to a certain degree flash sites can be optimised for search engine results, albeit usually with lower rankings.

Flash has its place, but don’t fall into the trap of spending thousands on a massive flash project because you could soon be regretting it. Sensible use in a good HTML site is the way to go. If you do insist on using flash, develop a HTML version of the site also, or at least a html navigation system and a few plain pages of text.