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Keeping track of all the tips and tricks that make up the ever changing world of search engine optimization can be a time consuming task, especially if it not part of your everyday job, and is just a tool you use to market your online business. So is it worth it to use one of the many online companies or consultant to maximize your SEO strategy and can it give the results that make it worth the investment? Here are some things to consider before hiring an SEO expert and to determining whether this method of marketing your website or blog is right for you.

How are you doing on your own?

Before looking to spending money on the services of an SEO consultant, it is first important to determine whether you are doing well enough on your own, and whether or not you have utilized all the easy and free tools available to you. Start by doing a search on a variety of search engines using keywords that people may use to find your website, business or blog and see where you come up in the results. If you are making the first page of results you may want to determine how much better a SEO company could do before making the investment. Also, if you are not using free online tools such as Google Analytics then you may want to exhaust these methods first.

Hiring a Professional

If you have done all you can or don’t have time to maximize your SEO strategy and are still coming up short on the most popular search engines, then hiring a professional SEO consultant may be in your best interest. If this is the route you decide to take making sure you hire the services of a company or individual consultant that knows how search engine optimization works and uses SEO strategies that won’t get your website banned from search engines is important. Google, for example is making active efforts to monitor and remove websites that use aggressive “black hat” SEO strategies, and the cost associated with getting yourself back online if this happens can be considerable. Always ask for references and examples of their work, and ask them about the types of strategies they use. In general stay away from companies that use purchased links, as these are the worst offenders to getting your site removed from search results.

In some cases, paying for the services of a professional SEO company or consultant can be worth the money spent, but like hiring any professional making sure you are getting quality service at a reasonable price is always important and is good business sense.

Finding it hard to keep up with your SEO strategy, and not convinced that all the tricks and tips you are using are getting you the results you want? Then may be is time to re-evaluate your strategy and make sure that you have covered all the easiest bases before launching into complicated programming ideas or costly SEO software packages. One of the easiest ways to get the most valuable commodity in the SEO world, backlinks, is to use forums; but using this method effectively is not always the most obvious. Before abandoning this technique here are a few tips to get the most of this fairly simple strategy.

• Know your niche and Google the most popular keywords for that niche – Whether you write about knitting or the latest security software, knowing where your potential customers or readers are asking questions will make your time spent on these forums more valuable.
• Identify the top five forums for your niche and join them – For this method to be effective, you have to join at least five forums. Most of your potential readers will be on at least one of these forums, and you’ll want to make sure you are getting to most of them.
• Post Replies – This may seem obvious, but the more you do this the more success you’ll have. Also making sure that your replies are useful to the user and informative to others will make people more likely to want to check out your blog or website.
• Create a keyword optimized signature – This is what will get you the backlinks, and is what will get you the results you want in search engines.

In addition to using this technique in forums to get backlinks, participating in forums can also get your website to rank higher on popular search engines by establishing your reputation as an expert. Posting interesting information that would be of genuine interest to other forum users, or providing accurate and helpful responses to questions can make others recognize you as a valuable source of information. Of course you must still always remember to include links to your website and blog in your signature or else this won’t work.

Overall, forums can be a great way to both optimize your SEO strategy and keep you finger on the pulse of your niche market. Remembering the general rules for creating content on the internet by keeping the quality up, and remembering to use every opportunity to include SEO tags to get the backlinks you want will get you a high ranking website or blog with minimal effort.

Monitor your visitors and increase your profits!

Last week, we discussed some methods for equipping your blog with analytics services that will tell you more about your visitors’ behavior. Today, I’d like t present you with some specific scenarios regarding how a program like Google Analytics could work for you. If you’re not using Analytics, you’ll see that you’re missing out on some seriously helpful information, and hopefully you’ll jump on the bandwagon!

Bounce Rates

You can use Analytics to determine what percentage of visitors come to your site, and leave without moving on to your intended action. Whether that’s clicking through to another webpage on your site, or signing up for an offer, you can bet pages with high bounce rates need to be modified.

If your click-to-conversion page has a high bounce rate, ask yourself questions like these – Is your offer large enough for people to notice? Do you give your visitors a proper value proposition to get them interested? If they should be able to contact you with questions, is your contact info clear, or is there an FAQ?

If visitors are bouncing on pages like a sitemap, it’s possible that you need to organize your information better. With more and more pages becoming optimized for Web 2.0, you’ll need to arm yourself with the best pages possible to compete.

Visitor Time

There are reports available in Analytics that will let you know how long visitors are spending on your site based on what keyword brought them there. This is as useful as a Google Adwords Search Query report in that you can use this information to help build out your negative keyword list in Adwords. If you find a visitor coming to your site with a keyword that isn’t relative to your content, it’s a good idea to consider making that a negative keyword in your Adwords campaigns.

You can also see if the average visitor over time bounces from your site when brought there with a certain keyword. If you see a repetitive pattern happening where users spend under a minute on your site by using a general keyword, you may want to consider changing match types in Adwords, or eliminating that keyword from your marketing arsenal.

Another useful way to use visitor time is to look at content placements. If you find that, over time, a certain site brings in traffic that either won’t convert or bounces quickly, you can exclude that placement from within your Google Adwords account. It’s easy!

Geography

Many people don’t consider how useful geographic information can be. Take a look at what countries, states, or general area your visitors are coming from depending on your market. If you find that a majority of your visitors are coming from one country, why not build a campaign or landing pages that specifically cater to that country or area?

You may also want to construct your campaigns built on your power country’s peak time zones, to get more converting traffic out of that country.

With so many useful tools available in Analytics, there’s no reason not to take advantage of all the reliable, and FREE information out there for your blog.

To keep a leg up on your competitors, you need to know what people are doing on your site.

If you don’t have appropriate tracking in place on your site, now’s the time to get it. Not knowing how visitors are behaving once their visit your site is only going to hurt you. You could be monetizing basic visitor actions that would make you thousands of dollars if you were only paying attention.

Here we’ll discuss a few free, basic analysis programs available for your website, and how you can best utilize the information they can provide.

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Google provides some very useful, and very free tools that could help you make the most out of the various elements on your website.

Google Webmaster Tools can be found at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ .

With this powerful tool on your website, you can get an SEO analysis of various page factors, as well as an idea of where you stand in SEO rankings. It’s fairly simple to install on your site, and will give you a lot of insight.

Google Analytics is even more useful, in that it will show you how users are interacting with various parts of your website. http://www.google.com/analytics/ . Using Analytics, you can take a look at how long users stay on a page, what sources are giving you the most clicks, and what pages users are “bouncing” from, or leaving, quickly. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to make changes and improvements to your web page that are consistent with your conversion goals.

Another tool worth looking into is Wassup for WordPress. http://www.wpwp.org/ . Wassup is advertised as a “real-time” WordPress plugin, allowing you to take a look at visitor source and the visitor’s path through the website as they browse. Google Analytics and many other analytics tools take a while to process visitor information, and display that to you on your dashboard. Wassup claims to take the time out of that process by giving you real-time visitor info.

I Have the Tools – Now What?

If you have Google Analytics or other tracking services in place, your first step is to wait and gather some data. After a few weeks, you should have an idea of how users are behaving once on your site.

Begin by viewing the different reports available in the interface you’re using, and ask yourself what that tells you about your users. Is there a certain page, or a certain part of your conversion process, where you’re losing the most users? Do you find that people spend more time on some pages than others?

Our next blog entry in this series will talk about specific scenarios where your Analytics information could benefit you, so you’ll know exactly what to look for. Until then, do yourself a favor and put tracking into place that will give you info about what visitors are doing! You may be missing out on much more info than you think. Get started today!

So, you’re coming up with a social media plan for your website or blog, and you want to ensure as many people as possible are going to find you via bookmarking, following, and connecting on various social media websites.

Great – so how do you do that?

There are a few approaches to getting your website out there. We all know that if you don’t start social media profiles and have links to those profiles (like the famous twitter icon), people won’t necessarily know you have a Twitter account. You don’t want your readers to dig through your text to be able to follow you on Twitter.

You also want people who love your blog to be able to get updates from you on social networking services, and to know when you’ve posted something new or updated a feature on your site.

… And of course, the more you’re talked about and the wider your social networking reach goes, the more you’re going to be indexed. If you’re searching for yourself and you’re not seeing your social media profiles in the first few pages, then you have some work to do.

Twitter Me This

People love Twitter. Microblogs give us the opportunity to find out what’s going on without having to read a lengthy blog. The more convenient we can make updates for our readers, the more they’re going to be interested in keeping up with us – and possibly going to your site, where they can dig in deeper.

Twitter profiles and entries tend to index quickly. With such a large number of users interacting and exchanging data, this isn’t surprising.

I’ve worked with people who have 2-3 twitters going on just for one brand or enterprise. They have their Seesmic or Tweetdeck desktops open throughout the day, tweeting and interacting. Is this a good thing to do? Well, if you can keep up with it, refrain from posting too much duplicate content and if you can keep your followers interested, then it’s absolutely a good thing.

Multiple Twitter accounts or too much presence within one social media network becomes bad for your brand when Twitter is as far as you’re going.

Deepen Your Reach

There are far too many great social media networks out there used by people across the world to engage with users in Facebook and Twitter only. If you’re only using these two networks, consider branching out. There are plenty of great social media tools that will allow you to manage multiple social media networks at once.

Consider some of the following tools:

Knowem.com – Knowem will show you what your social media presence is throughout different networks, and can help you find networks that would give you good exposure for your brand.

Ping.fm – Ping will allow you to implement and manage several social networks at a time. It also has nifty plugins for WordPress and other similar services.

Hello.txt – Hello is very similar to Ping.fm, but you can manage multiple Twitter and other accounts using this network.

There are plenty more options out there, needless to say. Even if a social media network that gets less traffic than other networks turns one user on to your site or product, it could be well worth the time you invest in your profile.

Selecting the right keywords for your website content and html tags is still one of the most fundamental parts of any SEO strategy. While anyone starting a website or blog is likely to spend a considerable amount of time selecting the keywords they think will get them top search results, how often should you revisit the task, and how can you determine whether you have selected the keywords that are working the hardest for you? The following tips can help you keep your SEO strategy fresh, and your keywords the most effective they can be for your website or blog.

Evaluating your results

The first thing to consider when deciding whether it is time to rework your keywords is to determine whether they are performing as they should. There are a number of great tools on the market, both free and proprietary that can make this a fairly simple task. One of the best free keyword tools is part of Google’s popular Analytics application. If you haven’t signed up for this application then you absolutely need to. It is a great tool for your overall SEO strategy, and the keyword tool can help you determine the overall search results for each of your keywords.

If you are in the market for a more customizable SEO tool then you may want to consider purchasing the top selling SEO PowerSuite, though you may also want to think about the rather expensive price tag before making this decision. It has a variety of features that can really help you maximize your SEO strategy, and the keyword tool will not only help you evaluate your keyword results, but give you suggestions for more effective keywords as well. Though Google Analytics also has this feature, SEO PowerSuite is much more effective overall, and will improve not only your Google ranking, but your overall ranking online.

Improving your Keywords

Both Google Analytics and SEO PowerSuite can offer you tools to improve your keywords through suggesting ones that may be more effective. While this can get you started on improving your keywords, what sort of strategy should you have to maximize these results? The temptation to “keyword stuff” can be overwhelming, and while this can temporarily improve your rank, if your content quality goes down this may have the reverse effect on your revenue stream from PPC links or donations. One way to get around this is to try including keywords in areas of your website other than the content. Using meta tags in your pages title, using multiple domains, and working on your backlinks can all improve your overall ranking.

So in general, developing a regular routine of checking your keywords with some sort of SEO keyword tool and making improvements based on the provided suggestions, as well as your own experience will keep your website or blog where you want it to be.