Spring is here! While many of us associate the season with shedding our heavy winter jackets and window washing, we online marketers have our own type of spring cleaning to tackle. Because SEO is an ongoing project, not a one-time thing, you’ll want to take a look at your web stats at least quarterly and make adjustments where necessary. Here are a few SEO Spring Clean-Up Tips: [Read more…]
Internal Linking for SEO: Why and How?
An internal linking strategy isn’t the first thing one thinks of when they think about SEO (if they think about it at all). But SEO is always evolving and as Google’s algorithm seems to be moving more and more toward semantic search, it’s not a bad idea to assess how you are using internal links on your website.
Internal links are simply links from a page on your website that point to other pages on the same domain. For example, your menu is a set of internal links that appears on every page of your site, hel
ping visitors navigate around the internal pages. The way you set up your menu helps define the hierarchy of your website, which in turn provides a clear path for search engines spiders. Not only do spiders look at content on your pages, they also try to understand the context of that content by checking out what else the page links to, and which other pages on the site link back to it.
We always counsel our clients to keep the anchor text (i.e., the text where the reader clicks) for menu items simple and descriptive. Because menu items are standard across the whole site, it’s more important to keep them short, sweet and useful for your readers than to try and cram them with target keywords. Contextual links – those that appear within the body of your pages’ content – are more appropriate for including keywords and will provide greater SEO value than your menu links anyway. [Read more…]
Using Schema Markup for Better SEO
Schema markup is a way of tagging data to make it easier for search engines to understand the information on your web pages, which in turn allows the search engines to serve more relevant results to searchers (searchers = your customers).
Markup languages (or more properly, markup formats) like HTML, all work the same way in that you tag portions of the content on a page to define exactly what it is and how it should be treated. In the case of HTML, the markup tags tells the browser how to display the content, (for example, H1 tags are meant for top-level headings and are usually displayed with large font). But while HTML can tell the browser how to display the content within the H1 tag, it can’t explain to the search engine what that content describes – which is where schema markup comes into play. [Read more…]
Online Marketing for Small Business: Three Things to Focus on in 2014
Happy New Year, fellow small business owners! What resolutions have you made for yourself and what goals have you set for your company for this upcoming year? At Panoptic Online Marketing, we’re committing ourselves to doing a better job of blogging (heh). Especially since consistent, twice weekly, posting to a company blog is something we regularly recommend to (and in many cases, do on behalf of) our clients.
It’s hard to maintain an active online presence – as a small shop, we know EXACTLY what you’re facing with respect to your own small business marketing. If you’ve never ventured into the world of internet marketing and don’t know where to begin, then the prospect of getting your message out there can be that much more daunting. [Read more…]
What Local Citations Means for Your Business’ Online Presence
In our previous post, we talked about the importance of claiming your Google+ Local Page. The Google+ Local page (previously known as Google Place page) is just one of the many citation sites where you can list your business.
What is Local Citation?
Local citation, or “mention” of your business information on a website or page, is one way of building your site’s authority. Citations can be a mention of your business name, address and contact information in an online business directory website or a local business association website. [Read more…]
SEO Basics for Small Business Owner
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a common theme of website-redesign projects these days. Many RFPs dedicate an entire section to the topic, which can be quite confusing to those who do not completely understand it.
Let’s walk through a few steps to understanding and approaching SEO… The major work needs to be done by the owners of your website’s content, and your search rankings depend on your adhering to a few well-established rules. [Read more…]
Have You Claimed Your Place in Google+ Local?
According to the latest study conducted by BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, a whopping 97% of consumers are going online to search for products and services in their areas. For local businesses, these types of searches are the most important because they often result in a quick conversion, either with phone call or a visit to their physical store.
So how do local searches work in Google?
Google remains the top “go-to” search portal where consumers turn to find local businesses. To do a local search in Google, the consumer either adds a specific location to their search parameter (New York City, say), or Google will do it for her by returning search results based on her GPS coordinates. Search Engine Watch’s Linkdex recently report that 69% of the time, search results are significantly affected by the searcher’s geolocation, so if your business hasn’t claimed its Google+ page then you might be at a disadvantage.
Google Places is now Google+ Local
If you’ve been trying to make your site more visible through SEO and online marketing tactics for a while, you may remember listing your business in what was used to be called Google Places. In early 2012, Google Places was replaced by Google+ Local, along with the conversion of some 80 million Google Places page to Google+ Local pages. With this change, what use to be a static “Place” page morphed to a more dynamic Google+ Local page, integrating more seamlessly with other Google products.
