Digital Marketing Mastery: Insights, Strategies, and Tactics for Success

Yearly Archives: 2013

How to Protect Yourself from Future Google Updates

Google Updates
Google Updates

Google has been consistently modifying its search algorithms to make better results when surfers come and search. These updates have been directed toward link building, and more recently, spam. The goal of the Penguin 2.0 update is to weed out sites that had little or no content that manipulated the search engines results with the use of excessive webpage strategies. While some WebPages plummeted from their search ranks, others felt a very little affect or no affect at all. With each update to Google’s algorithms, there is a risk that the site’s rankings will change. Here are some things that you can do to prepare your site for future Google updates.

Can I Do SEO Myself?

SEO Rank
SEO elements

If you own a website, and you have not hired a SEO company to help with your digital marketing strategy, then you should look into doing some of your own SEO strategy, or Search Engine Optimization. SEO can help create traffic to your website of customers that are interested in your product. It is quite possible to create SEO for your website without the use of an digital marketing company in New Jersey, but it is also possible to be your own dentist and pull your own teeth as well. In both cases, users will likely experience less pain and better results by hiring a professional to take care of what they do best.

What is SEO?

If you do not already know, Search Engine Optimization is the process in which you assure your website is placed higher in the search engine results than that of your closest competitors. Most searches that are done use Google, MSN, or Yahoo, while Google has such a strong hold on the search engine market that many tips for SEO strategy are geared toward it. To understand how it works, you must understand how a search engine chooses its results.

Social Media Marketing for Medical Professionals

Social Media
Business Social Media

The Internet is a gathering place for information, services, and products. Everyone is taking advantage of social media websites to help promote and sell products. Physicians and other healthcare industry employees can utilize social media to market their services as well. They can also keep in close contact with patients while they are not in the office. Here is some information about how many medical professionals are taking advantage of the marketplace that has been created on social media websites.

Understanding the Average Patient

To understand how medical professionals are using social media websites, you need to understand  the average patient that they see today. A large number of people, long before they ever think about going to a doctor, look up information on how to treat or what they can do to treat their ailments on the internet. They find an answer that will subdue them for the time being and return to their daily lives. If the problem gets worse or does not go away, they will then search out the help of a doctor.

Digital Marketing for Doctors

With the addition of a digital marketing strategy to your healthcare site, your future clientele will be discovering you online while reading through information about the problem that they are having. This changes how they interact with you, the doctors. Potential patients are often found reading what other patients had to say about past experience with your practice. For all the rest of the doctors to keep up and not lose out on this quickly evolving market, they need to optimize their online reputation as well as offer information and services to patients using social media sites.

Where to Begin

As a doctor in this technologically advanced world, it is important to know where you stand in Google’s organic search results and what the online community has to say about you. These are some of the most influential pieces of information when it comes to digital marketing for doctors today. If you have not already begun a plan of creating an online presence, you may want to contact an SEO specialist who can help you keep up on all your new advertising tools.

What is the History of SEO?

SEO Tips
SEO Tips

Search engines have become something that is commonplace in our day to day lives and it’s very hard to even try and imagine our world today without them. It’s hard to realize sometimes that search engines are only about 20 years old. Because we have unlimited sources of knowledge at our fingertips there are many things in our lives that have changed. Search engines have changed how we find out information, our study habits, and even our educational abilities. They have also changed how we connect and interact with family and friends. And they’ve even changed how we search for products and services. We do not have to stumble on an ad in order to find a desired service or thumb through endless yellow pages, we can actively seek out the information we desire about anything that we want to purchase. The ways consumer behaviors have changed have really been instrumental in the growth of SEO as we know it. We can become so accustomed to the way things are that we forget how they even began.

How do I know if My SEO Strategy was a Success?

Local SEO professionals
Local SEO strategy

When it comes to determining if an SEO campaign is successful it’s all about measurement. There are several metrics that can help the SEO professional know more about their strategies and how they may need to be tweaked. Page rankings, links and referrals are some of the key measurements SEO specialists may consider when determining how successful the campaign is.  Measuring an SEO campaign can take many different forms and this can become complicated since the web is in a constant state of change. In order to stay ahead in this climate and ensure that a website remains competitive it’s essential to dedicate some time to the evaluation process. But what are we supposed to look at or measure when determining if a campaign is successful or not?

Engagement

Even if an SEO campaign successfully drives traffic to a site it does not mean the campaign was a success. When traffic arrives at the site only to leave without visiting another page it counts in the metrics as a bounce. Search engines note when traffic to your site bounces out at a high rate and it can potentially lower the site’s ranking in the SERPs. It’s important to properly analyze engagement factors like bounce rate and how long visitors spend on a page. If there are some specific keywords which lead to poor engagement compared to some of the other keywords you may want to target new keywords. Use engaging content and keywords in order to improve the quality of traffic to the site through SEO campaigns. It’s essential that users be engaged.

What is On Page SEO?

SEO
Marketing

In times gone by SEO was all about working on the backend of a site and the focus was all on Meta descriptions, title tags and links. Google soon caught on to some of the unethical ways that people were manipulating search results by gaming the system and they changed up the algorithm used for determining site rankings. Google changed their focus, and so should SEO experts – at least those who want to see their sites rank high in the SERPs. Google now wants to see quality content that uses keywords which are inserted in ways that humans will understand them rather than just “stuffed” in to attract the attention of the search engine crawlers. On-page SEO is what is done to the site’s textual content that is read by humans when they read the site or blog.

How Important is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is very important as it can increase your site’s SEO efficiency. If you spend the maximum of your energy or budget on building links while ignoring on-page SEO strategies, you’ll be wasting your time. Link building is an essential part of ranking your site in the SERPs, but well designed on-page SEO can be much more beneficial. On-page SEO can be completed properly and then you really will not have to worry about it again. When it is done right, you will receive more relevant and targeted traffic. Ignoring on-page SEO strategies you’ll likely get traffic of lower quality. As long as you are using white hat SEO methods your on-site optimization is actually the safest form of SEO and it won’t get penalized by search engines. Diligent on-page SEO will be logical to both humans and search engines. Avoid penalties and increase ranking by removing duplicate content, simply web page designs and make your site easy to navigate.

What are the Elements of a Successful SEO Campaign?

Successful SEO
Successful SEO

Good Search Engine Optimization is hard time consuming work. Building a successful campaign is like building a solid structure that is going to stand the test of time. An SEO campaign is successful when it has a foundation that is solid enough to be able to endure many challenges posed by competitors and changes that occur in the search engine ranking algorithms. There are many different aspects and elements included in SEO best practices and SEO itself is constantly in a state of flux. The elements of successful SEO campaigns can be brought down to three essential parts which will work together to support each other and the entire campaign: content, links and social media.  Working with a reputable SEO firm can help ensure that you utilize the latest in SEO best practices on your site.

High Quality Content

It’s just logical that great content is an essential part of SEO strategies. Your website should act as a hub and contain good content as part of the on-site strategies. It is noteworthy to mention that the site itself must be high quality as successful SEO simply cannot exist with a poor website. Every piece of content on a site should be high quality and purposeful. For an SEO campaign to be successful there are no shortcuts. Remember that articles or blog posts are indexed by the web crawlers but should be developed for the readers not the search engines. Blogs and websites should be regularly updated with fresh, unique and valuable content. There is also some content that is seen only by browsers and crawlers – Meta content. URLs, Meta titles, Meta descriptions, and Meta keywords are all considered to be “content” and must accurately use SEO best practices.

How to Use Google+ for SEO

Google Local Pages
Google Local Page

Google+ can be a beneficial part of an SEO campaign. For those who are not yet using Google Plus, it is likely because they do not know how to take advantage of the platform or misunderstand the nature of Google+ and how it can improve SEO results. There are several different ways to strategically use Google+ for SEO purposes.

Google+ Content

Content on Google+ is treated by the search engine just like content that is on any other web page. Any content that is placed on Google+ will be indexed and can gain page rank as well as be listed in search results by Google. This can be very beneficial since about 2/3 of all searches in the United States take place on Google. It is essential to have your content searched and indexed. The posts made on Google+ will appear as search page results which manes that some of your audience may be able to find your Google+ content through a regular search on Google. The content will be online, gain in page rank, and appear in SERPs for a long period of time. It’s even possible for some of the posts to continue ranking indefinitely – even as long as a year. Most tweets only have about a 14 minute lifespan on SERPs so one year is really good real estate.