Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
SEO for small businesses on a budget
Taking a break from usability and operations that I normally address. Seobook.com published an outstanding guideline on setting up and marketing a business online on a budget.
The guide is straight to the point and offers a ton of good information about how to jump into SEO, analytics, hosting, and online marketing. What I like most about the article is that they give specific resources and products to make it happen, rather than the blanket, “you need to do this, find a company to do that, buy something like…” that we all suggest, all too often. Additionally, they pretty much break the costs down to about the cheapest a business can possibly get them for.
Anyway, I highly recommend this article for those new site owners or site owners on a budget that need to just get started with SEO and online marketing…
I will say that the article does not cover anything related to usability, design, or the actual setup of a website, which are extremely important. This article is applicable to businesses that have a website but if you are planning on setting up a website for your business, this article will give you a good direction and options of marketing, seo, and analytics, once you actually get your site up and running.
Business seasonality, and search trends for your marketing
Chances are if you are an online retailer your have some seasonality to your business. This mainly depends on the type of products you sell, and the general type of people that purchase your products. As a B2B’ish industry we see major volume decreases near every holiday.
Where does your business fit-in?
The once a year rush…
The every holiday surge…
The B2B…
Or the product launch…
With Google’s and others’ free tools on the internet, a small business owner can get very good insight into business seasonality, and shopping search trends. If you have good relationships with your suppliers and manufacturers, it’s often possible to design pre-release campaigns for upcoming products. Search engines place some weight on the first websites to write about specific products or services. If you’re that website, you can gain considerable traction in natural search rankings, and possibly a huge sales boost once the product is launched. This is just one example of how trends like this can be used, but the possibilities are endless and the data is free.
Ecommerce How-to List for Do-it-yourself’ers
Following a post from Matt Cutts, I have been collecting how to’s every time I come across one that I use. I have about 900 saved up now, in just about every area imaginable.
There are so many how to guides that people need for running their ecommerce website’s. With that in mind, this is a list of very useful how to’s related to ecommerce. Hopefully this post will be a good resource for site owners, and those looking to get into ecommerce. Topics include everything from setting up a web server, marketing, to integrating a website with a payment gateway.
Why both natural and PPC traffic are important.
Pay per click advertising has become a completely integrated part of search engines, and many website owners fail to see the value in either natural traffic or PPC traffic.
A while back I found a table that compared the click through rates of Natural and PPC search traffic. I cant seem to find the original source any more, so my apologies for not citing the source of this information, although it was a reputable source.
I have placed the data from that table into an easy to follow graphic model of a common search engine result page.
SEO – a guide to the blogs
At some point during the search for knowledge regarding search engine optimization and online marketing, most website owners will start searching through the SEO blogs. This is a good idea to do right from the start.
SEO blogs often cover many more topics than just “SEO”. SEO blogs often reach into every aspect of online marketing, which is very fitting considering most SEO’s also play their hand on mediums of traffic on the internet other than organic search engine traffic.
What makes a good SEO blog?
The main ingredient is high quality, unique information. Interesting enough, these traits are also shared by good websites in general.