Author: Mike Quayle

During the 1990s Internet boom, search engines (and thus organic traffic) hadn’t quite taken hold of the market yet. Business owners passed out pencils and mouse pads with their websites emblazoned across the front, so it’s obvious that the name of the game back then was building a brand — similar to the Amazons and YouTubes we have today. While branding is still an important consideration, organic SEO is the name of the game for now.

That being the case, choosing good keywords for your SEO marketing campaign is vital to being successful online. Click here to read last week’s Part I of this article.

One of the first steps to marketing any website is to research appropriate keyword targets for link building, on-page optimization, and social media exploits. Of course, it’s also one of the areas where most new SEO professionals make the most (and the biggest) mistakes. Many new web developers simply state that they’d like to “rank number one.” My first question is always “for what?”

It should go without saying that keywords are what drive search engine rankings. Your site could rank rather well overall for multiple keywords, but the main focus is on intelligent keyword targets with adequate traffic to secure visitors, and little enough competition to give you a chance to compete with other websites trying to rank for those same keywords.

So how do you determine the right keywords for a SEO marketing campaign? How can you use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool effectively to nail solid keyword targets for your website?

It’s human nature to want to fit in. In our day-to-day lives, we’re constantly trying to fit our ideals and personalities into the little sub-groups that society has built for us. We want to be comfortable among our fellow humans, to be regarded as “one of the guys or gals.” But this attitude also pervades the Internet content world. It’s easy to go with the flow when it comes to creating web content. You can simply pick a title that makes sense for your needs, check what other people have done, and make your ideas just different enough to pass a Copyscape check and not inspire the wrath of the duplicate content gods.

But while I’m not suggesting that you show up to your next parent-teacher conference meeting in a cape and top-hat for the mere sake of looking different, it is important to set your content apart from the rest. To bring new and unique ideas to an Internet sadly lacking them. If your content is suffering from an identity crisis, perhaps it’s time to consider your own.

In today’s digital world, no business can afford to ignore the internet and the many opportunities for growth that it offers. Establishing and maintaining a strong digital presence is key to remaining competitive and attracting new customers. Here are eight ways to use the internet to...

Search Engine Optimization – or SEO as it’s commonly known since the full term is such a mouthful – can be a complex concept to grasp. Once you get the terms down, like keywords, organic search, link building and so on, then you get to the actual stuff of SEO.

We know it takes a lot of expertise to get it right, but there are a couple of things that you might be doing to make it even harder to get good SEO … and you might have no idea! Here are the top three ways people hurt their SEO when they think they’re helping it, so you can stop the damage before it takes you down: