This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.
In my last Santa’s Helper Quick Tip, I offered an easy way to find long tail keywords using the “suggest” feature of the search engines’ search boxes. This time, I want to talk about using Google’s Wonder Wheel to find related searches and potential keywords to target during your keyword discovery. If you haven’t used it yet, I highly suggest that you try it out.
The Wonder Wheel can be found on the results page under “Show Options” and then “Standard View”. I did a search for “grinch who stole Christmas” and then clicked on the Wonder Wheel option:
You can see my original search query in the middle, and related searches branching off. The other branches are clickable and will bring you to another set of related queries. It’s an easy way to see other keywords people have searched for related to your original topic while you are uncovering relevant keywords related to your business!
Have you given Google’s Wonder Wheel a spin?
Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar
This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.
It’s that time once again where we prep for the Holidays and look ahead to the new year that’s sprawled out in front of us. While thinking about my personal and professional resolutions, I started wondering what 2010 might have in store for us (where are those psychic abilities when you need them?).
Thankfully, Rand over at SEOmoz shared his predictions for the SEO world next year, and it’s absolutely a must-read. His 8th and last prediction interested me most, since I realized that I spend so much time optimizing other websites, I hadn’t noticed Google & Bing trying to keep traffic on their own sites. Essentially, Google and Bing are answering questions about weather, flight information, when your favorite team is playing, etc. so you don’t have to visit a different website to get that information. Very interesting, indeed.
What are your predictions for SEO next year? I’d love to hear ‘em!
Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar
This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.
Why Long Tail?
Long tail keywords (phrases that are 3-5 words in length) are very helpful to add into your organic search marketing campaign. Although you will probably have less people coming to your site with this longer search term, this traffic will be more qualified. Why? These visitors have something specific in mind and if you offer what they are looking for (and have optimized your site for it), they are more likely to spend time on your site and research your company.
Find New Phrases
Let’s say that you are a retailer who sells Christmas ornaments and other related holiday items. Obviously, “Christmas ornaments” is a short tail and competitive keyword (a Google search garners over 7 million websites for that search). But what are some relevant longtail keywords that you could optimize your site for or write about in your blog? Just go to Google and start typing “Christmas ornaments” into the search box and check out the options that Google Suggest offers to you. It’s a quick way to get ideas and see what phrases would be worthwhile to target. And you can do the same in Yahoo and Bing as well.
Implement Them
Once you’ve found the terms that are relevant to your product or service, all you need to do is write your website content for them and optimize the on-page SEO elements. It’s also great for blogging, because it can start generating ideas for posts about information that people are obviously searching for (don’t forget to use the phrase in your title and in the body of the post, too).
If you’re looking for more information on long tail keywords, you can find it here.
Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar
This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.
I recently had a very interesting conversation with my mother-in-law about social networking. She is the creative director for Portland Ballet, who is probably best known locally for their traditional Victorian Nutcracker performance each year. She is feeling the pressure to be more active on social networking sites but she has a major dilemma she is working through – almost all of their ‘content’ is protected under creative content licensing. The music, images, how a ballerina points her toe a certain way is all protected. She cannot run the risk of a guest at one of her shows shooting video with their Flip cam and uploading it to YouTube or photos to Flickr etc. I am fortunate to not have the same legal concerns she does but it got me to thinking about how we decide whether or not to protect our content online.
Protecting Your Content
We in the B2B world love to hide our content, behind long forms to capture data, through opt-in only lists, password protected sites etc. Why do we do that? If your content is hidden behind a form yes, you will get the reader’s information for them to download but you lose a lot of people at that form as well. Would you rather the 3 forms filled out or your content to be free and seen by hundreds of eyes? That is a choice you and your organization have to make.
Spread your information
Seth Godin recently wrote a post How to protect your ideas in the digital age where he talked about this same topic. Seth’s take is to spread your good ideas. Let people know what a resource you are and then they will come to you when they are ready to start a business relationship. What is your take on protecting your online content?
Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar
prediction interested me most, since I realized that I spend so much time optimizing other websites, I hadn’t noticed Google & Bing trying to keep traffic on their own sites. Essentially, Google and Bing are answering questions about weather, flight information, when your favorite team is playing, etc. so you don’t have to visit a different website to get that information. Very interesting, indeed.
