Category Archives: Search Engine Optimization

Four Key Ways You Can Use Your Business Blog As Part Of A Comprehensive Search Engine Optimization Plan

When it comes to establishing an online presence, businesses in every industry recognize that search engine optimization is a proven resource. Here are four ways you can use your business blog as a part of your overall search engine optimization plan. The result is increased online visibility, higher ranks in the search engines, and a following that recognizes you as a thought leader in your industry.

Upton Technology Group: Experts In The Search Engine Optimization Benefits Of Blogs

At Upton Technology Group, our team of website marketing experts understands that creating a business blog can play a significant role in a well-executed search engine optimization plan. Easy to create and establish and relatively inexpensive, a blog can quickly help a business put themselves on the online map. While it’s no secret that a blog can make a major impact in a short time span, it’s important to wield its power wisely. Understanding four critical factors when going live with your company blog can make all the difference between being a mere face in the crowd or actually standing head and shoulders above the competition.

Compelling Content: Just like other online copy used for website marketing and search engine optimization purposes, it’s vital to only post blog pieces that contain informative and engaging content. Never arbitrarily stuff a piece with relevant keywords at the expense of the message. While your company may receive an initial traffic uptick with stuffed pieces, the overall results of the website marketing campaign can get diluted quickly. Need another reason to write compelling content? Your blog should be more than just an SEO tool. Its purpose should be to inform and educate your current and potential customers. Write content they actually want to read, and you will soon have avid followers that consider you a thought leader in your industry.

Post Often: Want to dominate the search engines for your industry niche? Post new blog articles frequently. Browser algorithms actually seek out fresh Internet copy and weigh it heavily when determining which site shows up first. Unlike standard websites that only allow for a specific page count as it relates to your business, a blog delivers infinite publishing opportunities.

Always Fill Out Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Both the title tag and meta description are searched by the browsers as additional means to determine the content of the piece. Utilizing these blog sections will further entice the browser algorithms to notice your company as more than a passing blip on the Internet radar. Failing to include these two sections translates directly into missing a major website marketing opportunity.

Include Backlinks: Backlinks provide clickable text within the online copy that channels Internet viewers to a specifically targeted page on your website. Always include at least two backlinks in every online blog post. For maximum search engine optimization, always include two different backlinks and attach them to two different keyword phrases. To further leverage this powerful website marketing technique, strategically align your business with other organizations and develop a backlink exchange campaign. Having your company’s backlinks showcased on other blogs broadens the overall search engine optimization impact.

Ready to create a business blog? Contact Upton Technology Group today to find out how we can help you get started!

Getting Started With Search Engine Optimization

When To Change Your Search Engine Marketing Campaign

Whether you’re just starting to consider search engine optimization or already use search engine marketing to help your company, there will come a time when you decide to start or re-start your campaign. This initial moment is one of the most important moments in your marketing program because it will determine a lot of what happens from that point onward. Although search engine optimization takes time to see results, knowing when to get things started is important because you’ll be launching a total campaign. You don’t want to change things too frequently, yet new marketing initiatives can generate fresh interest.

New Products Always Warrant Re-Evaluating Your Search Engine Marketing

Whenever your company releases a new product, it’s a good idea to look at whether or not you’ll want to initiate a new search engine marketing campaign as well. You will certainly need to change things a little bit, otherwise your potential new clients and existing customers may never know that you have a new offering to provide. However, the way in which you announce and promote a new product can vary dramatically depending on what it is and what result you want from it.

At a minimum, a new product generally warrants some new search engine optimization. The reason for this is simple: you’ll want to ensure that people searching for that product can find you. This is usually easy to accomplish and can be done via adding pages to your existing site rather than creating a totally new strategy. However, it may sometimes be worthwhile or beneficial to launch a totally new search engine marketing campaign to promote a new product. If you don’t want to lose the associations and benefits of your old search engine marketing by changing up web layouts and other identifiable features, you might consider treating the new product as a sort of separate element of your company. You can brand it individually and promote it individually, maybe even creating a separate website for search engine optimization purposes.

Don’t Be Too Quick To Change Your Search Engine Optimization

Over time, your customers will grow to recognize certain key elements of your search engine marketing. For example, your logo and your website design will become very recognizable very quickly. Changing them is not necessarily a bad thing; it will definitely be noticed by your regular customers, but it will also lead them to lose recognition of things that were once key identifiers for your company. For example, if you use a particularly notable color scheme, that was almost certainly associated with your company. Changing it will lead people to wonder what’s different, but will also lead them to no longer recognize the new colors. The same thing is true with a logo. This has more impact on search engine marketing than search engine optimization (people rarely memorize entire paragraphs, and large portions of text are what matter most for search engine optimization strategy.)

If you’re thinking about changing your search engine marketing to accommodate a new product, or simply to keep things from getting stale, Upton Technology Group can help you create a dynamic new strategy that will get results. Contact us today to learn more!

A Beginner’s Guide To Search Engine Optimization

At Upton Technology Group, our clients come to us with many different levels of search engine optimization knowledge. Some have heard of search engine marketing and know that it’s a great way to promote a business online, but don’t really know what it is. Others have scarcely even heard the words. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, this guide will help you understand search engine optimization so you can know how it might benefit your business in the longer term.

Search Engine Marketing Is What Makes The Sale

Search engine marketing is unique because it isn’t really about selling your company to people who aren’t yet convinced they want to buy. It is not push marketing at all. Instead, it’s all about selling your particular product to someone who is already looking for the general type of thing you offer. For example, if someone is looking to buy a refrigerator, search engine optimization can help guide them to your particular refrigerator supply business by ensuring that your company shows up on the top or near the top of search engine results.

Search engine optimization can help you connect with a new customer base, but the results will be mixed at best unless you really have something to offer that demographic. For instance, the hypothetical refrigerator company mentioned above could target people looking for freezers, and it could rank highly for those terms – the benefit would just be debatable if it didn’t actually sell freezers.

Search Engine Optimization: The Art Of Connecting Your Business With People Who Want To Become Customers

Search engine optimization is simply the art and science of getting your website to rank highly in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for certain targeted terms that you select. Search engine marketing is what goes beyond that, and includes a number of more difficult marketing techniques. Search engine marketing uses your high rank from search engine optimization to communicate with potential customers about the benefits of using your product over your competitor’s.

Search engine marketing has many different aspects, all of which need to work together for the best results. Content marketing is one of the most important aspects of search engine marketing, and ties in with search engine optimization as well. Content marketing includes all of the text on your website, but also all the text in articles that you publish on the internet. Search engine optimization ties in with your text because the keywords in that text are a major part of the overall search engine ranking that your webpage will get. For that reason, good content is a cornerstone of successful search engine optimization; because reading that content will ultimately be what makes customers choose to buy your product.

SEO & SEM Work Together

Although search engine optimization and search engine marketing are distinct, they are absolutely inseparable. You can’t have one without the other. Without strong placement in the search engines, the best web copy won’t be seen by people who intend to buy. Without strong sales-oriented copy, a good ranking in the search engines won’t lead to sales. Understanding the difference between them is important, but it’s even more important to understand how they work together.

Integrated Website Marketing: Are You On Board With This Strategy Yet?

As website marketing professionals, we at Upton Technology Group are always looking to help our clients get the most out of their marketing efforts. We see many companies who are successful in one aspect of website marketing, such as search engine optimization or web design, but who fall short in another important way. Today’s market doesn’t permit anything other than strong marketing on all fronts; that’s what makes integrated marketing so important. With integrated website marketing, you create a unified message across diversified marketing tools. Your web design fits in neatly with your search engine optimization, which in turn is backed by strong offline marketing. When you combine all of these, you obtain much more marketing power than would be available through one avenue.

Good Search Engine Optimization Is Inherently Integrated

No company can afford to skip over search engine optimization in today’s highly competitive environment. As more potential customers turn to search to guide their product choices, it’s pretty much imperative that your company come out on top. Search engine optimization starts with your company’s own homepage and your own web content. Web design is a natural part of it.

But that’s not all there is to search engine optimization. To be done right, search engine optimization will also incorporate things like link building, which is best done through content marketing. Content marketing involves putting your company’s name out there by publishing articles. Those articles will create valuable backlinks and help your website rank more highly, but they’ll also establish you as a thought leader and industry leader within your field. You become an authority on the topic, and at the same time you make your search engine optimization more effective. It’s a win-win situation.

Good Web Design Ties In With Your Other Marketing Endeavors

Web design is itself a combination of many other factors. For instance, web design implies some form of logo design. It also requires some degree of web development to meet technical challenges, such as the creation of an online ordering system, or simply the organization of your website to ensure that it can be easily navigated. While not all of these are marketing related, all of them are interconnected and impact the final product.

Web design is the background that highlights all other elements of your website. When done well, web design ties your website together with your other marketing in subtle ways that might not even be obvious to your visitors. It is things like color and logo design that will make that connection, and that will solidify your company’s identity in the process.

Offline Marketing Is A Crucial Part Of An Integrated Strategy

There’s a strong tendency for today’s marketing experts to unintentionally ignore the offline in favor of an online focus. While the world’s eyes are increasingly shifting toward the internet, there are still many instances where offline marketing can reach them just as effectively. The key is targeting your offline efforts to ensure that they have maximum impact. They should coordinate with your search engine optimization and content marketing. When you put all of these disparate elements together, you get a powerful and effective campaign where every element supports and enhances the others.

Upton Technology Group continues to lead the way with integrated website marketing locally and nationwide. If you’d like to learn more about integrated website marketing or any of its component strategies, we’d be happy to work with you and create a custom plan for your business.

How To Prepare For Your Web Design / SEO Strategy Meeting

Starting out with search engine optimization can be a daunting task, even if you have good guidance. One of the best ways to help your search engine marketing company create the best plan for you is to spend a bit of time preparing before you have your first web design discussion. Upton Technology Group encourages everyone that we work with to take these steps before our first meeting to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness of our planning.

Questions To Think About

The first thing to consider is what you want out of the search engine optimization strategy. Generally, we see two main goals: either general company awareness, or pushing of a specific product. While the general strategy for search engine marketing remains similar between the two, there are important differences, which make determining which one you want to focus on a rather crucial decision.

In addition, you’ll need to decide how much you want to invest in your web design, and then how much you want to invest in search engine marketing. There are many different types of plans which can be created and tweaked depending on your budget. Although determining the exact cost of each ahead of time can be infeasible, deciding whether you want to work on a shoestring, a moderate budget, or a maximum campaign is an important choice.

Deciding What Questions To Ask

It’s just as important to know what you want to ask the search engine marketing experts. We always want you to ask questions – it helps ensure that the solutions we create are achieving your goals. Depending on your own knowledge of search engine optimization, your questions may be very basic or very complex. Don’t hesitate to ask anything; there is a lot of misinformation on the internet about search engine marketing, and we’re happy to set the record straight.

Come Prepared With Your Current Marketing Materials

Deciding what type of web design and marketing will serve you best is much easier if we have a thorough understanding of what you’re currently doing. Bring any samples that you have from current initiatives, including clips of video spots. Everything you bring will help provide a better sense of what you’re looking for out of search engine optimization. In addition, it will help determine what (if anything) you want to keep from the themes of your previous campaigns. If you’ve developed a particularly recognizable logo, that may be worth keeping. Of course, you may also want a complete change – it depends on your situation.

Make Notes Of Any Major Search Engine Marketing Initiatives From The Past

The final step to prepare you for your first strategy session is to bring information about any kind of search engine optimization or search engine marketing that you’ve done in the past. Whether it was minor and ineffective or had a great impact doesn’t matter. Knowing what’s been done recently will help with planning for the future. Having this history be as complete as possible is helpful, but not required. Just collect what information you can.

Having all of these facts gathered together will help your first search engine marketing strategy session proceed much more smoothly. You’ll have to answer these questions and gather the data eventually; collecting it before your first web design meeting will simply speed up the timeline and speed up the results.

How To Use Google Analytics To Inform Your Search Engine Optimization Choices

A few weeks ago we discussed the many different ways to measure the success of search engine optimization. We talked a little bit about Google Analytics, and mentioned that it was a powerful tool for tracking a number of different website marketing metrics. In fact, Google Analytics is a key component of any search engine marketing strategy because it provides some of the best info available in a clear, concise fashion. Best of all, it’s free to use and easy to incorporate into your webpage.

Getting Started With Google Analytics Website Marketing Metrics

The first step for using Google Analytics is to actually sign up for it. This is as simple as registering for a Google webmaster account, and linking your webpage to that account. The full details for how to do this are readily available through Google. Depending on whether you were in charge of your search engine optimization or you had another company do it for you, your website might already be registered and tracking your metrics. Ask your search engine marketing provider whether they set it up, and if so ensure that you’ve got a way to access the results.

If it’s not set up, you’ll have to place actual lines of website code inside your page. You may need to ask your website marketing company for help here, but it’s well worth it for the information that you will receive. The task itself is fairly simple, but can be overwhelming for a first-time user. Upton Tech generally provides this service for our clients.

What Search Engine Optimization Info Does It Provide?

The data gathered by Google Analytics is directly useful for website marketing. The code you place on your website will track everyone coming into your website and leaving again. This simple tracking yields powerful search engine marketing results because it tracks in rather great detail. For example, it can tell you where someone came from. Did they get to your page through online ads for website marketing? Did they arrive directly? Or did they click over from Google’s search engine, indicating that your search engine optimization is taking effect?

Taking Your Search Engine Marketing To The Next Level

There are many layers of detail which can be viewed through Google Analytics. For companies just starting out with website marketing, the raw data of visitors to the homepage is usually sufficient information for most decisions. As your business grows, you can begin exploring the more in-depth elements of Google Analytics. It is a very powerful service, capable of revealing where most visitor traffic originates, how long they viewed each page, and more. This more detailed information might overwhelm a new user, but is perfectly suited to a more experienced search engine optimization consultant.

Most companies who are serious about search engine optimization in the long term will install Google Analytics quickly and start using it right away. This powerful tool is something that no website marketing team should miss, It is completely safe for your website and has no impact on user privacy, yet provides valuable information for your search engine optimization team.

Is Your Website Designed For Maximum Search Engine Optimization Success?

Although content is the single most important element of search engine optimization, many search engine marketing companies overlook an important element: the actual web design of your company’s online presence. There are many technical adjustments which must be made in order for any web design to maximize availability to search engines. In addition, there are visual tweaks which can help appeal to the new audience that your search engine optimization brings. Being aware of these and implementing them on your website will be a major help to your search engine marketing strategy.

Web Design Could Be Hiding Your Webpage From Search Engines

Unless your website was created by a company that knows the rules of search engine optimization, you could have elements within the code of your website that makes it hide from search engines. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all allow developers to temporarily opt out of having their web design projects listed in search engines by having them marked as noindex or nofollow. That simply means that the search engines won’t index that page, and won’t count links from that page in their ranking calculations.

The first thing you should do before starting a search engine marketing campaign is make sure that none of these markers have been placed in the code for your website. You want the search engines to be finding your page and indexing it for their rankings. Otherwise, your search engine optimization efforts won’t be successful. Most web design companies will have at least some knowledge of search engine optimization techniques, but it’s always wise to check for the presence of these tags before starting your search engine marketing.

Creating A Web Page With The Right Appeal

Your web design is the backdrop for your search engine optimization. The words are what really tell the story and drive the sale, but the strongest search engine marketing goes beyond just text. It includes a full examination of current web design to determine whether or not you want to make changes. Successful search engine optimization will draw in a totally new group of visitors. They are less likely to know your company, and less likely to be specialists in your product field. An overly specialized or niche web design may counteract the effects of your search engine optimization strategy by driving them away.

When we suggest search engine marketing packages, we always try to include some form of web design evaluation. The best search engine marketing web design will include a detailed look at your industry, especially if you’re looking to break into a new market or a new market segment. Understanding the details of the new market and creating a web design based on that will help you ensure that you make the most of the new traffic generated by your search engine optimization.   

Whether you’re looking to add search engine marketing to an already existing web design, or want to start from scratch, Upton Technology Group can help you make the most of your online presence. We will ensure that every element of your web design is search engine optimization friendly, and that you’re using the right search engine marketing techniques to really drive traffic.

3 Ways To Go Above And Beyond With Your Search Engine Optimization

The basics of search engine optimization aren’t all that hard to master. You need to carefully choose your keywords, and keep your website marketing updated with fresh content. Generate links to your website from other places, and try to make sure that other places are talking about you. This is a pretty surefire method for search engine optimization success…assuming that you’re not in a particularly competitive field. Unfortunately, most search engine marketing takes place in a very competitive field. In order to experience the highest degree of success, you have to take everything you do to a higher level. You need to go above and beyond regular search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Extra Credit #1: Create On-Site Articles

Basic search engine marketing requires that your website have relevant content. Going above and beyond means that you don’t just limit yourself to webpages for that content; you put it in a slightly more formal and more didactic format, the on-site article. On-site articles can have a slight promotional slant, but they should be written primarily from a position of teaching the reader. For example, a graphic design company might publish an on-site article about how to effectively communicate with your graphic design company, or how to choose the right company for the reader’s needs. The topics are virtually endless.

These on-site articles should be written with search engine optimization in mind. They should feature the right keywords, and should link to other pages on your site as well. Consider them as part of your website’s overall search engine marketing strategy, because that’s exactly how the search engines themselves will see the pages.

Search Engine Optimization Extra Credit #2: Search Engine Marketing Press Releases

Most people know that article marketing and publication is a big part of search engine optimization. It’s a great way to get others linking to your site, and it helps set your company as a thought leader within your field. There’s another way to drive backlinks which offers another great benefit: search engine optimization press releases, which can get picked up by major news organizations.

There are many different options for publicizing your press release. It need not be quite as keyword dense as a typical webpage in order to achieve its search engine marketing goals; what matters more is the keyword links and press contact section that you include. Deciding where to submit your search engine marketing press release can be a bit of a challenge, and we recommend that you ask an expert before you spend any money on press release submissions.

Search Engine Optimization Extra Credit #3: Landing Pages

Local search engine marketing is all about showing your local clientele that you are uniquely qualified to understand their specific needs. The more local you can get with your keywords the better, but it’s often impractical to build your entire site around one very specific local area. It would exclude everyone outside that area, and generally would do more harm than good.

Instead of targeting a specific area throughout your site, create a page for each area and choose your keywords carefully. With the right search engine marketing strategy, you can ensure that these pages are the first thing a local searcher will see in the results. They click that link and see that you’re a local company, and then they’re forwarded to your larger site with more general keywords. The local feeling remains, yet you don’t have the drawbacks of completely local search engine marketing.

There’s A Lot More To It

This is only scratching the surface of more detailed search engine marketing. There are many things that should be done alongside simple search engine optimization to help maximize the return on your investment. They aren’t hard, but they can be difficult to organize if you’re new to search engine marketing in general. Upton Technology can help you determine the best options for your company, and we’ll also help you implement and manage everything as you continue to develop your website.

Interactive Website Marketing: Tips For Engaging Your Audience

Search engine optimization is an important element of any website marketing program, but it’s not the only element that a good program should have. Today we’re going to talk about another really important ingredient for search engine marketing success: interactive website marketing. There are many ways to incorporate interactive elements into your website marketing. Some of them can be pricey to implement, but others are surprisingly inexpensive and very easy. When done right, interactive website marketing is the perfect complement to search engine optimization, and a real benefit to your website’s bottom line.

What Is Interactive Website Marketing?

Interactive website marketing is any kind of website marketing which directly involves the visitors in some kind of action. Rather than simply reading the search engine optimization content, there is something else for them to do. Contact forms are not generally considered interactive website marketing, but games, eligibility calculators, forums, and many other common web design elements are. The trick to interactive marketing is that it must engage people. They must gain something from it (that might be entertainment, or something more tangible or educational).

How Does It Help My Current Search Engine Optimization Strategy?

One of the biggest benefits of interactive website marketing is that it provides something people will want to share. If you’ve got a particularly useful calculator for mortgage rates or interest, it will get shared. If you’ve got a unique game, it will go around the internet. Successful interactive marketing is about much more than entertaining a single visitor: it quickly reaches beyond an individual person, and starts bouncing around the internet at large. Once it reaches this status, it will begin benefitting your search engine optimization through increased backlinks and general traffic. Google and other web crawlers will see that your website is increasingly referenced and visited, and you’ll get a boost in your rankings to augment your current search engine optimization.

Discussion Boards Are A Simple Way To Get Started With Interactive Website Marketing

Designing and creating a web-based game from scratch is a tough task that few companies will tackle. Once you’ve got an established web presence it’s more than worth the hassle, but when most companies start out they choose a simpler website marketing technique: discussion boards. Discussion boards are a classic element of interactive website marketing. They’re easy to set up, and depending on how they’re structured and how they factor into your site, posts made on them may directly boost your search engine optimization results because they’re considered new, fresh content.

Discussion boards are interactive in an even more vital way than other forms of interactive marketing. Instead of the interaction being between a human and a computer, they’re actually able to talk with other humans. Your website can become an online gathering spot for people throughout your industry, with very positive effects.

This kind of exposure and hub status is not for every company. You might also choose to limit your forums to discussion of your products, possibly including a place where individuals can ask questions and the community can answer. This might help you indentify potential problems before they become chronic. In addition, it provides a place where your staff can answer questions and address concerns directly — a vital addition in a world where customer service is more important than ever.

Adding a discussion board to your website isn’t complicated. The website marketing team here at Upton Tech can arrange it for you, or you can talk to your own website developer about it. With a few minor tech tweaks, adding a discussion board can be just as effective as the most flashy web-based game for interactive marketing and search engine optimization.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: Understanding The Search Engine’s Suggestions (And Requirements) For Website Marketing

There are many different search engines that should be considered when judging search engine optimization results. Although Bing and Yahoo! have substantial traffic and do offer some search engine marketing benefits of their own, the vast majority of all searchers are using Google. Google has also taken the most active role in improving their search engine and taking a lead on website marketing, which is why most search engine optimization professionals look to Google before looking anywhere else.

To help search engine marketing professionals and amateur webmasters alike understand what Google’s engine is all about, they publish and maintain the Google Webmaster Guidelines, which provide advice about website marketing and outline the offenses that Google considers abuse of the system and punishes severely. Everyone with a website should read these guidelines for themselves, but in the meantime this rundown of the most salient points will help you get started on website marketing.

Google Rewards Good Web Design

When Google’s search engine crawls your site, it sees more than just the website marketing that you’ve put there. It doesn’t see the finished product and can’t judge your website marketing design based on aesthetics. Instead, it sees a text-only version of the site, including links to other pages and all your content. Google’s crawlers want to see that your page is clearly organized, with a sitemap and logical flow between pages. For best search engine optimization results, don’t overload pages with links, and ensure that every page has at least one link pointing to it.

Search Engine Marketing Friendly Code Is A Must

There are many ways that code can harm your search engine marketing efforts despite being perfectly good design practice. For example, if you rely on images, make sure they’re accompanied by the proper “ALT” attribute description so you’re not losing out on any search engine optimization value from that picture.

Similarly, make sure that any content management system you use is website marketing friendly. Many of them may create URLs that include a ? at some point, the sign of a dynamic page. Some crawlers won’t look at dynamic pages, so you’re better off avoiding them if possible. There are many other little things that make code search engine optimization friendly, but they are quite technical. Make sure that you have your design company structure everything for search engine marketing from the beginning.

Search Engine Optimization Shouldn’t Be The Focus Of Your Content

Google’s website marketing guidelines say very little about how to choose keywords or how to successfully execute search engine optimization. Instead, they urge webmasters to focus on search engine marketing by creating content that will appeal to people who would want to visit your website. As for keywords, Google simply advises webmasters to think of keywords that people might search for to find your business, and ensure that they appear on the site. There is no emphasis on keyword density, although that has long been a proven element of search engine optimization.

The Website Marketing Quality Guidelines

These guidelines might seem like suggestions, but if your website marketing violates them you’re quite likely to get punished by Google. The main violations involve participating in certain black hat search engine optimization strategies, where a company gets ahead in website marketing by doing things that really don’t add value for searchers. These are things like link farming, including hidden text or links that only search engines will see, and in particular anything that involves duplicate content. Duplicate content is arguably the best way to completely sink any search engine marketing effort, but it’s also easy to avoid: just don’t put the same content up twice.

There are many specific guidelines offered by Google, but these basics are enough to help business owners understand what search engine marketing consultants are doing to help boost rankings. We recommend that everyone read the guidelines for themselves (they aren’t long at all) to gain a thorough understanding of what really drives successful search engine optimization and website marketing, at least through Google.