This can be very competitive, so it is very important to be specific on your demographics, time frame, and source websites. If you are advertising on specific websites, your can even target people of a certain age, gender, or financial status. This makes it all the more important to understand where your advertisement will be shown.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization. When your website is fully optimized for the search engines hopefully your website will show up on the first page of the search engine results for your key words, without having to pay the search engine provider. This is referred to as organic search results. Getting organic search results pointing to your website takes time and the more content on your product / service the more relevant your become to the search engines. Regular changes to your website will be required to maintain your preferred organic results status.
There are 2 types of SEO:
White Hat- Legitimate ways of optimizing your web site that meet the requirements of the search engines as acceptable practices.
Black Hat- Practices and or suspect design and / or coding that manipulates search engine results or analysis of your website in a attempt to get more favorable results.
With all the old information on the internet on SEO, it is very easy to get bad information that can get your website blocked by Google due to black hat practices. Google has become smarter and smarter, and in 2012 a lot of the rules were changed, and what was common place 3 years ago is now considered black hat. When you buy a domain name, you can also be a victim of a dead domain, which has been blocked by Google due to black hat that the previous owner has done with that domain. If your website gets blocked, it is usually fixable, but there is nothing that is quick when it comes to SEO. I recommend viewing Kissmetrics Blog on the “50 Reasons your Website Deserves to be Penalized by Google”. This is a very informative article on the DONT DO’S to SEO. If you read any articles on SEO that contradict with the mentioned article, I would probably walk in the other direction.
In a ideal world you have a very unique product or service and you show up in the search engine results because you are the only one talking about your topic. Unfortunately we all have competitors, so that means we must have the most relevant content on a product or service. Content is king, but without it being relevant all that webpage writing can be in vane. What make a website relevant? Link popularity is the key indicator to the search engines that your content is credible. Like popularity are links from other websites that are referencing web pages, articles, or blog comments that point to your website. This is where it starts to get confusing, not all links back to your website are equal, and some links can actually hurt your website, while other links can make you a superstar. You only want only quality and related topic websites to place links to your website from their website. A perfect example of this is if you sell software, and Microsoft has placed a link to your website on a article on their webpage, this one link is probably worth more in credibility to the search engines then 500 links from 500 smaller unknown or unpopular websites. This is also a example of getting a link from a credible website and a website with relevant content. On the other hand if your software store website got linked from a credible beauty products website, but not relevant to their content, the link could have a negative impact for both websites.
SEO is a specialize marketing role, with the main purpose of developing website credibility and awareness. I mixture of the following activities can be done to develop website credibility:
- Writing articles on similar topic websites
- Establish referencing and commenting links back to your website from similar topic websites
- Likes or positive comments on Social media
- Article posts or expert comments you do on social media
Which method you use really depends upon what your competitors are doing and how you are currently ranking on the search engines. More then likely you will need to use a combination of methods mentioned above, article writing, and a active social media presence will be required to remain competitive in SEO.
So where do you start to find what your competitors are doing? This will take a bit of reverse engineering. This can be a very manual process lots of Google searches and spreadsheets. Commercial tools can be a huge time saver on identify what your competitors are doing and compare how your website stacks up to others. Some of the commercial tools that I use are:
Ahrefs - Used to analyze keyword position and reverse engineer external links that your competitor has. The service is pricy at $79 per month, but if you do not know where to start you will find this tool very revealing. I recommend using it for a month to get an export the initial Excel data of your competitors then canceling once you have all the data you need.
SEMRush - Analyize keywords for CPC and search volume of word with Google, find all the competitors for those keywords, and identify all the external backlinks of your competitors. The service cost $70 per month. I recommending using them for a month or two to capture then export the information you are needing, then cancel when you have the data you need.
Buzzstream - very similar to CRM, i call it LRM Link relationship management. Allow you do scrap website for contact and establish communication with the website for linking requests. The best way to use this tool is to take the competitor links list you generated from Ahrefs or SEMRush and import it into Buzzstream, you will be able to scrape for contacts, and manage and keep track of your communications for all your link building efforts
Social Signals on every article and page.
