Let’s flash back to senior year of high school. Homecoming football game. Prom king and queen. SATs and the overwhelming college applications. Aside from the stress of hoping to be accepted into your top school, nothing was worse than the daunting college essays. George Mason University has taken a colossal jump into social media and has allowed students to submit YouTube videos about themselves in lieu of an essay. Mason is one of the first universities to fully embrace social media in the application process and provide an alternative to the grueling application process. Creativity, at its finest. I may be a little biased since Mason is my alma mater; however, it’s great to see institutions of higher education think about integrating social media into their existing processes. For an example, see below:
As a student, would you prefer the new alternative? Surely, I can bet that admissions counselors are loving the fact they can put their reading glasses down, kick up their feet, and enjoy the creativity and passion that prospective students are putting into their college application. For the full story, please click here.
When people think of a brand, the first things that come to mind are companies like Nike, McDonalds, and Starbucks. Few people pay much attention to what the true meaning of “branding” – which is what that company stands for, which can be summed up with one sentence, idea, or word. Eventually this trickles down to the consumer – what does it say about you to be a consumer of that company?
A better way to think of branding is the literal meaning – think of a rancher taking a branding iron to his cow’s backside to mark ownership. That cow will spend his remaining days sporting a logo that has a meaning behind it – namely that he is property.
Back to the companies, they have taken that same hot branding iron, and marked their companies. Apple’s says COOL. If you use buy Apple products, then you are cool. Disney says WHOLESOME FAMILY FUN. If you buy their products, then you are wholesome, and most likely have a family. Starbucks says AFFLUENT. If you buy Starbucks, you are a wealthy professional that likes paying $5 for a cup of coffee (just kidding…kind of).
It’s not only companies that are branding themselves. People can be branded – think of Donald Trump, or Paris Hilton, they have some meaning, whether it’s wanted or not. TV shows can be branded – one of my favorite shows, Man vs. Wild, was found out to have faked aspects of the show a year or two ago (for those that don’t know, Man vs. Wild is a show where the host is thrown into wild, exotic locales such as deserts and rainforests, and he has to survive and find civilization). People watched the show to watch the host, Bear Grylls, and say wow, that’s a manly man eating that fish right out of the river and drinking his own urine. The brand of Man vs. Wild was adventure, toughness, and sheer amazement. Now that we find out ole’ Bear was sleeping in at the Pines Resort, when he should have been freezing his balls off in the Sierra Nevada’s, well we are pretty pissed that the brand has been a fake.
The point is that a brand can be created or it will evolve naturally. In either case, a company needs to be aware of their brand, have a brand strategy, and control the messaging of that brand. For unknown startups, start thinking about your brand from day one. Control your message. Your company will be pressed with that hot branding iron whether you want it or not – don’t you want to have a say in what it says?
This is the last part of our three part series on link building. Just in case you missed it, please check back and read part 1 and/or part 2.
How do you build links? That is not an easy question to answer, as there are multitudes of ways links can be built for a website. Some popular methods include:
Directories: Directories are websites that list and categorize other websites, in order to organize the Internet’s information. They were popularly used by people in the past to navigate the web, and can even be considered the first search engines. Now, they are used by search engines themselves as they crawl directories to help them organize information. As with any site, some directories are considered to be of higher quality than others by search engines.
Press Releases: When press releases are distributed online, they are frequently picked up and posted on other websites thus increasing the number of backlinks.
Articles/Content Syndication: By writing and publishing quality articles, guides, and other content to content hosting hubs, valuable back-links are developed.
Existing Link Modifications: To increase the relevance of back-links, website owners can be asked to change which page of ones website they are pointing to, and what keywords are associated with the link to ensure targeted keywords are being used.
Text Link Advertisements: A valuable way to build high quality, relevant links to a website, is to research relevant sites and inquire about web advertisements.
Many of these methods do carry an expensive price tag. For example, PRWeb has four pricing tiers ranging from $80 – $360 for each press release!
Before embarking on any link building, consult a SEO professional (or Reef Light Interactive). Be careful though, please read our blog on deciphering the SEO experts from the self-proclaimed “SEO experts”.
There are certain rules to follow with each of these methods and best practices that will maximize the effectiveness of the link building campaign while keeping the costs reasonable. After all, who wants to spend $360 for a press release that generates no buzz because no keywords (or the wrong keywords) were targeted?
For any questions or to discuss your website in detail, get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you!
As promised, we’re back again for Part 2 of our special on link building, the most effective tactic for SEO. In case you missed our post yesterday, feel free to check out Part 1.
When search engines originated in the mid 90’s, simply incorporating keywords into your website’s page elements was enough to have it rank well. Spammers quickly understood that they could stuff hundreds of keywords in a page’s code, including keywords that were not relevant to the content, to have it rank well and generate a rush of search engine traffic. To combat spam, search engines needed another signal that would indicate whether they could trust a page enough to rank it well. The solution was to use elements outside the control of a webmaster, so they could not be abused. That solution turned out to be links — specifically, the quantity, quality, and relevance of links pointing to a page.
Quantity — Think of Links as “Votes”: Search engines use links as votes of confidence for what they are pointing to. If a page has two links pointing to it from two unique websites, it can be viewed as two votes for that page. If another page about the same content has one link pointing to it, the search engine will trust the page with two inbound links more, and will rank it higher in natural search results.
Quality — All Links/Votes are NOT Equal: All inbound links are not created equal. A link from a website that itself has a high number of quality links pointing to it carries more weight than a link from a page that is not well linked to. For example, if we continue the “votes” analogy for a political candidate, an endorsement from The Washington Post carries more weight than an endorsement from a neighborhood newsletter.
Relevance — Relevant Links are Better: Links from relevant websites are weighed more heavily than links from irrelevant sites. For example, if a NYC restaurant’s website wants to build links in order to rank better for keywords related to [New York City Restaurants], it should seek links from food blogs, restaurant review websites, and New York travel guide sites, as opposed to a website about the skiing in Denver, which is irrelevant.
Stay tuned for the last part of this three part series, to publish tomorrow, when we discuss link building tactics.
Last Monday, Forrester Research published a research study that indicated that online retail sales are going to continue to grow over the next five years. Specifically, the projections call for an increase of roughly $100 billion in spending ($155.2B spent in 2009, projected $248B in 2014). Is your business ready for this predicted 10% compounded annual sales growth?
Truth is, a lot of businesses talk search engine optimization (SEO) by using popular buzzwords like “keywords”, “meta tags”, etc. To explain SEO to many of our clients, I use the analogy of building a house. Before you can start building, you’ve got to lay a sturdy foundation. In the case of SEO, the “foundation” refers to a table-less and compliant web coding, researched and analyzed keywords, etc. Like a house, a sturdy foundation is vital; a prerequisite for any future optimization efforts. However, an effective SEO strategy must encompass much, much more than a simple foundation.
It’s true that a website can rank well by simply having a great foundation, but “well” is relative. Ideally, a website will rank for competitive, broad, generalized phrases and keywords. A solid foundation may increase search volume, but the volume will be based on less searched and less competitive terms. For example, let’s look at two phrases [red velvet wedding cake designer New York City] vs. [cake designer]. The latter phrase yields nearly 10,000 searches a month while the former yields just a few. As a business owner, would you like to try and rank in the top 10 of a 10,000 person/month search phrase, or rank in the top 10 of the more popular search? Naturally, you’d want to rank in the top 10 of the more popular search. Why? Because 95% of SEO traffic comes from Page 1 of the search results, so it’s imperative that you rank well.
As more and more people use search engines to find what they’re looking for online, it is more important than ever for you to ensure that your product/website has visibility. Visibility — there’s another relative word. According to a recent eMarketer study, it’s not enough to have some visibility — but rather a site needs to be visible on Page 1 of Google.
With all the emphasis on being ranked on Page 1 of Google search results, you’re probably wondering, “how in the world do I do that?” There are a number of ways, but the single most effective tactic to get a website to rank for a targeted keyword is by building inbound links. Inbound links are links from other websites that point to yours. Link building is a difficult, on-going SEO strategy. Stay tuned for part two, to publish tomorrow, when we go through link building’s history and overview.
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