Month: March 2016

Blogging for SEO: how to increase your website’s ranking

The blog: one of the most powerful tools in your company’s SEO armoury, but one that’s sadly often underused. While most websites have a ‘blog’ or ‘latest news’ tab, far too many businesses fire out a few posts in an initial wave of enthusiasm when launching a new site, only to never publish again. But if you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, drive traffic to your website, and generate more leads (and let’s face it, what business doesn’t want all those things?), you need to start populating your blog page now.

But beware. Effective blogging isn’t as simple as just writing a great post. Make the most from your blog by following these three simple tips.

Utilise keywords throughout your blog

Every new blog post is an opportunity to increase your ranking for a specific search term, so it’s vital that you identify a few keywords and include them throughout your post. Be strategic – consider where they’ll make the most impact on both your customers and the search engine crawlers, for example in the title, headings and subheadings, first sentence, anchor text, title tags and meta descriptions.

Never lose sight of the importance of readability, though. Yes, keywords are essential for SEO, but they should enhance a post, not compromise it. Ultimately, this is a chance for you to sell yourself and your company to potential customers; it doesn’t matter if the search engines love your blog if your customers are bored by it.

Host your blog on your own website

When you blog for business, always blog from your own domain. An integrated blog is by far the best way to boost your own website’s SEO authority. All backlinks to blog posts will contribute directly to your website’s overall SEO strength, and because Google et al love content-rich sites, the more content you have on your site, the better. Conversely, using a third party domain like WordPress or Tumblr helps to build their SEO rather than your own.

That said, there are some SEO benefits to using third party sites. They’re useful for increasing your inbound traffic and giving you good value links, but as many blogging platforms have ‘nofollow’ links, the chances are that they won’t help your rankings anyway (Tumblr is an exception to this).

If you want the SEO benefits of hosting your own business blog but the ease of using a third party blogging platform, consider Kick’s Web Content Management System.

Share your blog post on social networks

Every time you publish a blog post, share it on all your social media platforms. Search engines are notoriously tight-lipped about the extent to which inbound links from social networking sites benefit a page’s overall ranking. However, even if they are ignored by the likes of Google – which is by no means certain – sharing your blog posts on social media is a great way of directing targeted traffic to your website. Be smart about how you share: wherever possible, just post a teaser with a weblink, so that people have to click through to your site to read the whole article. And don’t forget to ask your followers to share your content too.

When done properly, blogging is a great marketing tool: it’s simple, it’s effective and it’s free. Don’t let it languish at the bottom of your ‘to do’ list – get blogging today.

Benefits Of Email Marketing

With its potential to achieve direct focus on your brand, product or service to your target market email marketing is considered one of the most efficient online marketing tools available today and should be an important consideration for any marketing team.

Email marketing makes use of e-mail to deliver information, data and any other information for a certain business to their audience thus successfully transmitting what the business wants their target-market to learn without having to spend large numbers in regards to marketing strategies. For businesses that are looking for a powerful way to communicate whilst keeping down costs, Email marketing could be the key.

Email Marketing Types
Most businesses utilise email marketing in 2 distinct ways, direct sales or informative news. Both methods should use an opt-in list of quality email contacts.
Sales emails provide your business the ability to introduce related items of purchased products to the customer or up sell to the customer by offering other details such as extra benefits for which a customer might be interested to take up.
Another way to do it is through direct email marketing. Direct email marketing contains the delivering of product information straight to the client. This can be a catalog or a special offer that might be unique or not to the intended recipient. Your business should make use of your subscribers’ opt-in record or even buy a list, we’ve listed a few places you can buy email lists.

Selectabase – https://www.selectabase.co.uk
Experian – http://www.experian.co.uk/small-business/b2b-prospector-emailing.html
Creditsafe – http://www2.creditsafeuk.com/data-solutions/business-marketing-data/

Benefits
Email marketing your businesses to talk about or show your latest products and promotions more quickly than using other traditional marketing techniques. Unlike twitter, Facebook and linkedIn you are able to put your message directly in front of your audience without them having to look for you. Following are some benefits of e-mail marketing when it is done in a proper way;

1. Easily target big audiences
Using the help of email marketing, you can now send your message to a bigger group with just a single mouse click. This is of more advantage for conveying any breaking news to a bigger number of customers quickly. It gives you the chance to work with your potential customers, getting their attention and helping them to do more with your updates.

2. Follow up sales
If a customer purchases an item from your website you can send them details about other relevant items to those they have bought. In the same way, it can be used for services associated to the products they have purchased. This kind of marketing is known as ‘Up-Sell’ and is very useful for commerce websites.

3. Eliminates distance barriers
Through email, companies who are working from different countries can also exchange their message more conveniently. These days, the moment you clicked send, your message is delivered instantly to the mailbox of the recipient. In the past, the process of delivering or getting letters takes times or perhaps weeks. This result is useless delay in decision-making process. Instead, e-mails instantly communicate the essential information to any member regardless of any hurdle.

4. Get feedback
One of the most significant things that any business would need to have is direct feedback from their clients. E-mail surveys allow the consumer to voice their true views and emotions about the company’s service or products. By linking up with a service such as survey monkey you can get important customer feedback allowing you to improve your products or enhance your services.

5. Communicate more often
Email marketing is a faster and more efficient ways to communicate your target audience. Once your platform has been setup you can quickly send emails monthly, weekly or even daily.

6. Track conversations
All popular email software allows you to track opens, bounces, forwards, un-subscribes and click throughs. This allows you to communicate with the people you know to be interested in your communications.

What Software to use
We’ve tried a number of email software packages over the years. You need to consider deliverability and ease of use over cost. Deliverability is of the upmost importance, if your emails land in someones spam or junk box there’s absolutely no point sending the email in the 1st place.

We recommend the following packages.
Mail chimp – http://mailchimp.com
iContact – https://www.icontact.com
Constant Contact – http://www.constantcontact.com/

Email Design
Your emails need to stand out, your customer will receive so many sales emails on a daily basis, why are they going to read yours over other peoples? You need to create a subject line that’s going to create interest and make a design that gives impact, draws attention and makes people want to read what you have to say.

The Conclusion
In conclusion, an email campaign is among the most powerful tools available in your online marketing strategy. Do not waste the chance and try to make the most of every message.