Don’t Forget About Branding

Many online companies concentrate on marketing tactics such as SEO because they think that it is the key to being the leader in a specific online segment, but there are really many things that cause someone to be seen as the leader in a specific segment. One of the things that can lead to great success on the web is branding. If you think about the leaders in specific industries, they are well branded.

If you want to increase the value of your company, you need to brand it. Here are 4 things to consider when creating a brand or trying to brand your company:

Identity

If your logo is not unique then it is going to be hard to brand yourself. You need to make sure it is different then the competition by using a different font as well as different colors. The last thing you want to happen is see all your branding efforts go to waste because no one can remember
your company.

Mascot

It is actually amazing that many companies don’t have a mascot. You don’t always have to have a company mascot, but it is a great way to stand out from the crowd and become more memorable. One company that has done a decent job of branding their mascot is BOTW.

If you look at the image above, it shows the many fox mascots BOTW uses for their directory categories. The reason why I feel the foxes are effective is because they match each one to represent a category within their directory.

Consistency

Tons of companies purchase banner ads to brand their company. It can actually be very effective. The problem with how most companies advertise is that they are not consistent with their banner ad designs. You want to use the same logo colors and stay consistent or else the branding impact will not be as effective. Granted, if you change the look or the colors on certain ads it may increase your clicks throughs but it probably won’t help as much when it comes to branding.

Creativity

Being perceived as industry leader is not an easy thing. If you really want to blow up you are going to have to get creative. A few companies have came up with creative ways to brand themselves such as CI Host and Half.com.

CI Host got tons of branding when they paid someone to put a CI Host logo on the back of their head.

Half.com also became very well branded when they got a city to change their name to "Half.com".

These are just 4 things that you can do to increase your chances of having a successful brand. Some of these things maybe tangible for you and others may not because of your budget. Either way if you get creative you can still brand your company on any budget. Just think of what Dish Network did… having a town change their name to "Dish Network" in exchange for free satellite TV, Brilliant!

Do you know of any other cool and creative examples of successful branding strategies?

6 Surefire Ways to Increase Your Rankings

After you have been in the whole SEO game for many years you end up learning what works and what doesn’t work. Whether you have money to spend on marketing or you have no money there are many things you can do to increase your rankings. Here are a few things you can do to increase your rankings:

1. Title Tag – it seems dumb that title tags can help increase your rankings, but it is true. By keeping titles short and descriptive they can help increase your rankings. One thing to keep in mind when writing title tags for each page is that they need to be unique and represent the content on the page.
2. Meta Descriptions – just like title tags, meta description tags can help drastically increase a website’s traffic. I usually like keeping my meta descriptions short, descriptive and relevant to the content on that page. The last thing you want to do is use the same meta description tag throughout your whole site because sometimes it causes search engines to see your website content as duplicate even if it is not. If you are running a WordPress blog you can use plugins such as the Head Meta Description plugin to automatically do this for you.
3. Headings – I usually like to use headings on all of my pages. Think of headings like a book chapter title, each section/page on your website should have a heading so people know what it is all about. The other great thing about headings is that they give you another opportunity to place keywords within your content.
4. Social Media – There are a lot of powerful social media sites out there that can drive thousands of visitors and links. If you study the Digg homepage or the Del.icio.us popular page, you will start noticing trends and if you can replicate them by writing content relevant for those audiences, then you too can gain thousands of links, which will help you with search engine rankings. Here are some things that I have learned from studying these sites:
   • Before you leverage these sites it is best to become a user and participate in them so that you can learn about the site as well as their rules.
   • By doing some quick searches on topics that are related to your website you will find out what will make the front page and what won’t.
   • 
     Catchy titles and descriptions heavily determine if a story succeeds or not.
5. Sitemaps – I personally have not seen a drastic increase in search traffic by adding a sitemap, but with large sites they do help. The chances of getting all of your pages indexed can be increased if you use a sitemap. One thing that you may want to consider is using Google sitemaps.
6. Directories – We all know that a great way to increase your rankings is by obtaining relevant links. One thing I like doing is to find all the free or paid directories that that I can submit my site to. They don’t necessarily do a world of difference when it comes to increasing rankings, but every little bit helps. Just make sure that the directories you submit to don’t use the nofollow attribute or else the link will not count. Three great directories that you may want to start off with are DMOZ, Yahoo and BOTW.

There are many other things you can do to increase your rankings, these are just some of the ones that have been effective for me. Are there any other methods that you have used and had great success with?

Interview with Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal

Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal has been doing a SEO site clinic which has been helping website owners increase their traffic, rankings and links. Because of this I decided to do a short interview with him:

What is Search Engine Journal’s benefit from doing a SEO site clinic?

Search Engine Journal benefits by helping the SEO community and companies which are starting their initial SEO by total transparency. We are working together, with our co-authors and guest contributors as a team to offer SEO advice to not only the sites which we have accepted into the SEO Clinic project but also the readers of our column who are working on their SEO. For example, when doing an SEO Clinic for a WordPress powered blog, our goal is that numerous WordPress bloggers will benefit from our SEO recommendations.

Our Resident SEO Pimps benefit via expanded recognition of their expertise and services to the SEO community. I think that it would be easy to charge anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 in consulting fees for such SEO oriented information and recommendation, but our ultimate mission is to help smaller sites and charities which cannot afford such SEO consultancy fees. In essence, such transparency should benefit the SEO and search marketing community as a whole.

How popular are your SEO clinics? Are they heavily linked to?

These posts have become quite popular throughout the SEO industry and the searchosphere. Many blogs and informational sites have linked to our SEO Clinic pieces, and our hope is that for each Clinic we provide, more sites which fall into the categories of our Clinic "patients" and link to the recommendations.

Do you have any recommendations for bloggers or website owners who looking to increase their links?

In each SEO Clinic, to date, we have discussed ideas for sites, such as TechSmith.com and BigOceans.com to attract links. In essence, the SEO Clinic will attract links to our patients from SEO blogs which cover the free SEO Clinic advice, but in each clinic we provide recommendations to improve links via building relationships with blogs in the niche categories our patients appeal to, and via social media marketing via Digg.com, StumbleUpon and other major traffic and inherent link building avenues.

Optimizing for the Long Tail

We all know that optimizing your website for search engines is a great way to increase your search traffic, but how many people actually try to go after the long tail? It may sound dumb but going after those often forgotten, highly targeted keywords can increase your search traffic by leaps and bounds. Here
are some things you can do to increase your search traffic for long tail keywords:

• Paint a picture – be as descriptive as possible (within reason) when writing your content. This could be through the use of more descriptive titles or just being more descriptive through the main content on your website. When doing this don’t forget about visitors because if this tactic will hurt their experience you should think twice about it.
• Efficiency is the key to success – you don’t want to try and figure out long tail keywords manually because this could take forever. A great way to find long tail keywords is to use analytics packages such as HitTail. One of the great things about HitTail is that it is free.
• Spy – have you ever noticed that tons of sites that use Sitemeter? The great thing about Sitemeter is that you can publicly see what keywords your competition receives traffic for. Spy on your competition and start going after the long tail terms that drives them traffic.

There are many ways to increase your search traffic by going after long tail keywords. Have you tried
going after long tail keywords yet?

Mash it up for Links

There has been a lot of buzz around the word "mashup" lately. In case you’re unfamiliar with the word, Wikipedia defines it as a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. An example of a common use would be a local, region based website that combines Google Maps with local business reviews.

Mashups are a great way to improve the usability of your website because you’re ideally offering something of value to your users. But mashups are also great for link building because the good ones are highly viral.

Mashups aren’t limited to websites and don’t always require programming either. A couple of weeks ago someone mashed up Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial into a Barack Obama ad.

The video has spread like a wildfire. It has been viewed over four million times, featured on every news station in the country, and has managed to collect thousands of inbound links. Not bad for a mashup that someone created on a Sunday afternoon.