Press releases have multiple different purposes when it comes to online marketing.  We all know that a press release is a great idea when you have an announcement to make.  Whether it is a new product launch, or a new service, or possibly even a new partnership.  There are other opportunities out there for press releases if they are done correctly and syndicated properly.  Let’s take a look at just a few of them.

Links

When writing a press release, it is extremely important to not just have a link back to your home page, but also to include some links to a top page or two within your site.  This is the perfect opportunity for you to choose what anchor text that you want to use and then drop the link in.  Once the press release begins to be syndicated and posted across the interwebs, you will be increasing your total amount of links for that particular keyword.  This is not only good for link building purposes, but it will also help drive initial traffic to those top, targeted pages.

Brand Awareness

Press releases are an easy way to help spread awareness of your brand.  If you are not constantly in front of your customers, others will be.  Along with the links as mentioned above, press releases help increase your branded organic traffic as well.  If increases your organic traffic is a big goal for you, than press releases can help with this.  For example, you own a company which sells a lot of other third party branded items.  If you do not rank for these third party items, then it is essential for you to get traffic from your brand, knowing that people are coming to your brand to buy the other brands.  However, if your brand awareness is not strong, people may begin to forget about your brand and go directly to the other third parties.  Press releases get people talkin again and searching for your brand once again.

Social Media

When I say social media here, I mean, how do you get your press release to spread faster.  Think about it, when a press release lands in your inbox, what do you do?  Do you forward it in e-mail along to friends?  Do you create and write your own tweet or Facebook post?  What if, within the press release the company already created a short blurb for you, that all you have to do is copy and paste into all your social media accounts?  Getting your press release to reach the most amount of people possible can be the hardest part.  Make it easy on those that would like to help share for you.

There are plenty of other tips about writing press releases, but these are three quick tips to help you get more out of your press release.

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Search engine optimization tends to get a bad rep with clients at times.  There can be multiple reasons for this.  For one, they may have had a bad experience with a previous  company that just left them feeling that SEO is just a snake oil sales pitch.  Another reason could be that there is not a full budget dedicated to SEO.  When this happens, you are left with only being able to do a few things that will make a successful SEO campaign.  Unfortunately, when it comes to SEO, you can’t just pick and choose which action items you want to do with your budget and then forget the rest of them.  Sure, it is great to have a site that has meta data across the board, but if you are not investing in link building, social outreach, content creation, proper site navigation, site technical issues (301 re-directs, canonical tagging, 404 error pages, etc.), then your efforts are just being wasted.

SEO is an all or nothing game.  You may want to debate this, but it’s the truth.  Think of SEO as building a house.  You start with framing out the house, but do you just not put up all the walls or insulation or move in furniture orpaint the walls?  Absolutely not.  That is the same with SEO.

SEO must also been seen as an investment like a house as well.  Building a house is a lot of money upfront and for the beginning of the project it seems like you have nothing.  But, the longer the project goes on, and the more work and effort that is put into it, you now have your beautiful dream home and the investment has paid off.  If you don’t want that investment or you want your results up front, then throw in some pay-per-click advertising as well.

So whats the moral of the story?  You must set realistic expectations when beginning an SEO program.  Do not think that you are going to create meta data and add a few keywords here and there within the site and then all of a sudden you are going to be ranked in the first position for these keywords.  If you have an in-house SEO team, be sure that your goals are set out from the beginning with a realistic timeframe.  If you are working with an SEO agency or contracter, than be sure to do the same with them.  Establish what your business goals are and be on the same page with them on a timeline.

Good luck and optimize away.

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I have heard from a lot of people over the last year or so that SEO is dead.  Or, SEO is dying, or this “thing” is going to kill SEO.  I’ve said this in the past, and I will say it again, “Shut up!”

Let’s look at what SEO stands for, Search Engine Optimization.  So what does that mean.  It means that you are optimizing your website, your content, your brand for the search engines.  In the past, social media “stuff” didn’t show up in the search results.  Your tweets or Facebook comments or YouTube videos were not in the Google search results when you searched for “steakhouses in Miami”.  Well, guess what shows up in the search results now?  Social freaking media!

Social is part of SEO.  Think about it, I’ll say it again.  Social is part of search engine optimization.  Why?  Because social statuses, profiles, tweets, videos, comments, statuses, they all show up in the search engines, and therefore should be optimized.  So how is SEO dead or dying?

Is the way an SEO, whether in-house or agency, creates a strategy different than what it was just last year?  Absolutely.  It is not just all about meta descriptions and titles and obviously not keywords.  It’s also not just about an XML sitemap, an HTML sitemap, 301 re-directs, canonical tags.  Although all of these items are still extremely important and are must haves, social media is now part of an overall SEO program.

If you are doing both SEO and social in house currently, than these two departments or employees should be holding regular and frequent meetings to make sure that all tweets are optimized, all YouTube videos are optimized and that all social media has a purpose.  Same thing goes to those that work at an agency.  Your SEO and social media teams should be working hand in hand creating overall search engine strategies.

So please tell me, is SEO really dead?  Or has it just evolved and is now bigger and more important than ever?

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“Should I do Pay-Per-Click or SEO?”  I get asked this question a lot and my answer is always the same.  Both.  By doing both of these forms of search marketing, you are allowing yourself to own the search results for your keywords.  Search engine saturation occurs when your pages are showing up within the paid, organic and image results.  There could potentially be some negatives to this, but let’s explore the whole picture.

The case for SEO.  Other than the costs of paying either an in-house search engine specialist or outsourcing it to an SEO consultant, it is free.  You are not paying every time somebody clicks, purchases, or bidding on a position.  Studies have shown that people are becoming smarter searchers and do not click on paid ads as much as as an organic listing.  They feel that the organic listings are more trustworthy as opposed to somebody who can just pay a higher amount to be listed in the paid ads.  Creating great content, which is a large portion of your SEO work, will also create something more for your visitors or customer based, as opposed to just having a great ad copy in a paid listing.  This does not make PPC campaigns bad either.

There are certain terms that are either so generic or have such a high powered brand attempting to rank for them that no matter how much SEO you put in, you may not be able to get to the top of the search results.  That is fine.  You may not want some of that organic traffic anyway, especially if it is highly untargetted.  One way to get your ad copy to be shown and to be clicked on by a targeted visitor is to utilize pay-per-click campaigns.  If you want to completely own the search results page and gain search engine saturation for a specific keyword or phrase, then you may decide to bid on keywords that you currently own the top few spots in the organic listings for.  This is a way to totally drive out your competition.  They do not show up in the paid search and they don’t show up in the organic search.

As you can see, there should not be a one or the other decision to be made.  They both can be helpful.  If you know that you cannot afford both, then it may be best to start with some SEO foundational work to make sure that your website is search engine friendly from the very beginning, so that if you decide to do SEO in the future, you do not have to go backwards.  If you are not looking for long term results, then a PPC campaign may be best for you.

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This post was influenced by a conversation that I had with Hugo Guzman (writes a great blog about enterprise marketing) several months ago that has been lingering in my head. Let’s face it.  Link building is one of the most important aspects of the SEO game.  Not only does SEO as an industry have a bad reputation, link building is an aspect of SEO that has an even worse reputation.  But lets take a different look at link building.  Link building is one of the oldest forms of social media, even before social media was…. social media.  When you say or hear the word social media right away you think Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, just to name a few.  But you don’t think link building.

Well, why not?  When doing linkbuilding, there are different parts to it.  There is the directory submissions, the internal linking and then there is the link outreach.  Reaching out to somebody and engaging that blogger or webmaster to build a relationship with them to update a link on their site, or to have them add a new link to their site, is the oldest form of social media there is.  Social media today is the same way, except you engage with somebody via Twitter for example.

An SEO consultant is already facing an uphill battle the second that they walk into the room.  Whether you are an in-house SEO trying to educate (notice I said educate and not sell) link building to your executives or if you are an SEO consultant or agency trying to educate your client.  It makes it even more difficult when there was a previous SEO attempt made at link building that just failed miserably.  It’s sort of like coming off a bad relationship with an ex who has cheated on you.  Luckily, there are tools that exist now (Raven SEO Tools for example) that allow you to show progress and show results to clients and executives.

Another part of link building is the paid link side of things.  This is the part of link building that has the worst reputation.  And once again, how is this any different then social media?  Aren’t there companies or people that are getting paid per tweet?  Is it right, is it wrong?  If there’s disclosure or transparency in your message than no, it’s not.

Link building has been here for a long time, and it will stay here.  But how about this.  If you still don’t think that link building is important, at least write so damn good content so people will naturally link to you.  But if you have great content, than why are you scared to share it?  Create great content and build links or let your SEO die.

It’s your choice.

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The title of this blog post is so important I’m going to say it again, Duplicate Content is Killing Your SEO!  There are several ways that you can kill your SEO efforts with duplicate content.  The first one that we are going to discuss is diminishing the SEO value that you bring to one certain page.  If you have two version of a single page, and there is not a canonical tag or a 301 re-direct in place, then you are splitting the value of your SEO between those two, or even 3,4,5 pages.  You are spending time, effort and money on link building to these pages and the link juice is just being spread too thin.  Therefore, killing your SEO.

The next reason why you are killing your SEO efforts is that you are confusing the search engines.  How can you confuse a search engine?  Aren’t they just supposed to confuse you?  Well, when you put multiple pages with the same content, how are they supposed to know which page is the main content page and which is the one that they are supposed to index and put in the search results?  Once again, you can solve this with a canonical tag or a 301 re-direct.  Keep in mind the difference between a 301 re-direct and a 302 re-direct.

These are two of the main reasons why the duplicate content is going to be killing your SEO.  There’s a simple and easy way to stop this from the beginning.  Plan out your site architecture thoroughly.  If you have an e-commerce site with the same product across multiple categories than be sure to have the canonical tag implemented on all the other products pointing to the strongest URL that you choose.

More on canonical URL’s to come.

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Recently, you may have seen some changes to the way that Google is displaying their results for big brands.  Google has been putting an emphasis on rewarding big brands this year.  The first way that they did this was by allowing the same domain to show up in the first 3-5 spots, above the fold.  Now, they made their Google site links a lot larger and it takes up the whole top part of the fold.  This gives you easier acces to the top pages for the brand that you are searching for.  Google is just making search so much easier for you right?  Not so fast.

Let’s think about what is going on here.  By searching for a brand, then you already know that you are looking for that brand’s website.  The only way for others to show up is by purchasing the one, maybe two pay-per-click ads that are on the right hand side.  This is now prime real estate.  So what happens when the demand for something increases?  The price also increases.  So Google is going to be making more money off the bidding war that is going to occur due to these changes to the site links.  But Google is all about making search easier for you.

Once again, not so fast my friend (insert Lee Corso voice here).

What does this mean for smaller brands now?  How are you supposed to compete with the big brands?  SEO was supposed to help put smaller brands on a level playing field.  Well, there are two different scenarios here depending on what time of small business you are.  Another player in the industry or an affiliate.  If you are an affiliate than you still have a possibility of ranking below the fold and getting traffic from those that venture below the fold and below the site links.  It will be interesting to see heat maps of search results pages with the new larger Google site links.  As an affiliate, continue you content and link building and rank the in the 3rd, maybe 4th position and put your self in the best position possible.

If you are another player in the game, another brand in the industry then you are already at a disadvantage.  If somebody is searching for the brand name of a competitor than chances you, you are not going to be ranking organically for that search phrase anyway.  So there’s not much lost in that situation.

This is still new and we will not know exactly how it will play out until some more time passes by.

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You have decided that you wanted to enter the affiliate marketing world, but you don’t know where to start.  Do you find the offers first and then create content around those high converting offers?  Or do you create content and then find offers that are relavent to the content that you are creating? Well, the best answer that I can give is, either or.  Let’s discuss both situations.

Find the Best Offers and Create Content Around That

Once you have signed up with an affiliate network and scour through all of the merchants and different offers that are out there and you do your industry and competitive research, you now find a few offers that you think are great.  The next part is figuring out how you are going to get traffic to your site to start getting people to convert on these offers.  You may decide to start a blog based upon the industry offers that you now have on your site.  If you are not the best at copy writing, then outsourcing the content creation may be in your best interest.  There are content creation services out there that are inexpensive that can help you create compelling content.  Now that you have good content being produced, it is time to make sure that it is being optimized and that your site is fully optimized for search engines.  Start your link building efforts, start capturing your visitors information, and have clear call to actions on your site.  If you are not passionate about this specific offer that you have and not a professional copywriter, then the next option may be a better choice for you.

Create the Content and Find Relavant Offers

The other side of the coin is that you wake up one day and realize that you are extremely passionate about something.  You take this thing you are passionate about, let’s use an example of myself, and say diabetes.  You decide that you have so much to say about the subject that you decide to start a diabetic blog. You just start writing, and writing, and writing until you have months worth of content and you have been engaging with the community.  Now, you decide that you are going to put some sort of ads on your site and start making money off of it.  You put up a few affiliate links that are relavant to the subject of your blog posts.  Notice how I said that they must be relevant.  An affiliate link about running shoes on this blog would not be relevant, so why would I waste real estate on the site for such an ad?  This way may be easier for you if you can write and you are able to use the passion that you have for the topic to create compelling content.

Here are two ways to approach affiliate marketing.  Which one is the right one?  I don’t know.  It depends on too many factors.  It depends on the industry, the community, and the market.  Decide if you are in it just for the money or because you have a passion and making money from your passion is just a bonus.

Affiliate marketing is right around the corner for you.  Just get passed the first step and figure out which path you would like to take and get a domain name.

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Purchasing a premium WordPress theme is a decision that you will probably come across one day.  There are a lot of great free themes that are available through WordPress.  They can even be customized by yourself just by learning how to edit CSS and learn a little coding.  Editing CSS is a lot easier than creating CSS from scratch.  By editing you will shortly learn how to write CSS.  If you don’t want to learn CSS or PHP then purchasing a premium WordPress theme may be a great option for you.

There are a lot of different options out there when looking for premium themes.  Do your research and find a theme that is similiar to what you are looking to do.  Before purchasing, I would recommend to reach out to the developer of these themes to see what kind of support that they offer.  If there is not a lot of support or nothing within the WordPress forums, than I would be a little hesitant in purchasing premium themes from that developer then.

A good idea is to take a look a look at the live preview of the themes that you are looking to purchase.  You may want to reach out to social media outlets and look to see what others have been saying about the premium WordPress themes.  If the theme developers offer free themes as well, it may be a good idea to install one of those themes first and see how well they work.  If you are not experienced in SEO or html code, than reach out to an SEO consultant to see if the theme is SEO friendly.  If it is not, then you may want to look for a new theme.

There are a lot of different tips in this post that can help you make the decision of which WordPress premium theme you should purchase.

Feel free to contact me with any questions that you may have.

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If you are a beginner to SEO, which is most likely why you are reading this blog, unless you are my mother, and in that case, Hi Mom!, you are probably hearing a lot of numbers involved with SEO and don’t know what they mean.  301, 302, 404, oh my!  Let me break down for you briefly what each of these are.  As a note, if you have read any of the posts on this blog before, you are not going to get a text book definition, but a real life definition, explained by how my brain works and how it will help you remember.

301vs 302 Re-directs

A 301 is a type re-direct that is used to forward one page to another.  You see these all the time and you may not know it.  If you go to URL #1, and then all of a sudden you end up at URL #2 without you doing anything, than you were re-directed.  Whether it is a 301 or a 302 re-direct you won’t know simply by seeing the re-direct happen.  A 301 re-direct is more SEO friendly because it passes along any and all SEO value that URL #1 may have had.  Meaning that if you had a page that was ranking well and had a lot of links pointing to that page, but one day you decided to change the URL of that page.  You would want to implement a 301re-direct from the old page to the new page.  As long as you use a 301 instead of a 302, then all of those links pointing to the old URL will be passed along to the new URL and you will not lose any SEO value.

A 301 re-direct is a permanent re-direct.  Meaning that the old URL is gone, it’s not coming back.  A 302 re-direct is a temporary or soft re-direct meaning that you may bring that URL back in the future.  For this reason, the search engines do not pass along the SEO value that goes along with these type of re-directs.

Hopefully these examples and brief definitions help you make more sense of the re-directs.

404 Error Page

A 404 is a code that is returned when the page you are trying to access does not exit.  You see these on a daily basis.  A 404 error page is not the worst thing in the world.  If you know that a page is not active anymore, it is a good idea to implement a 301 re-direct.  If a visitor tries to access a page that does not exist, let’s say a misspelling of a url, then they will be sent to the 404 error page.  Creating a custom 404 page can help search engines navigate to key pages throughout your site, but it also gives your visitors an opportunity to find high value pages within your site.

That is the brief explanation of the 301, 302 and 404 codes that you may receive on your site, and what to do with them.

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