panoptiblog

Three times in the last two months I’ve taken on small business clients who find themselves in an identical situations: they’ve spent good money for a high-design website, have generally been delighted with the results (ooh, ah — pretty!) and are perplexed when, a couple of months after launch, they see very low visitor traffic, or poor showings in search results, or both.  Even the least internet savvy business owners know that they need to show up in search results — and most have an intuitive understanding that the Top 10 sites returned in a Google search get the lion’s share of the visitors.

So why does it happen?

Because web designers are not search marketers, and very few of them are familiar with sound SEO practices.

In two of the three cases I mention here, the designers chose WordPress as their platform.  When we were conducting our preliminary research and competitive analysis for these clients, we saw their WordPress-based websites and thought, “Yippie — onsite optimization will be a snap!”

WordPress is great for SEO out of the box; using one of the popular SEO plugins, like Yoast’s WordPress SEO, makes it even easier and more robust. The plugin provides guidance for optimizing meta tags and on-page content, has options for applying basic indexation rules, generates and maintains Google XML sitemaps for you — all the behind the scenes stuff the designer doesn’t know or care anything about.  (Why should she?  She’s a designer!)

Read the rest of this entry »

With over 150 million users, LinkedIn is considered to be the largest professional network on the Internet.  A lot of people have been using LinkedIn for networking, job prospecting, and building credibility in their areas of expertise through the Recommendations feature, or by actively taking part in LinkedIn Groups.  But while many business owners understand how to use their professional profiles, only a few are taking advantage of the many benefits that the company page has to offer.

A study conducted by HubSpot in January found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Twitter and Facebook combined.  So if you haven’t created a LinkedIn company page for your business, or only have a brief description and/or logo there, you are missing an opportunity to give your business a more robust presence.

Here are some of the features that you can take advantage of to make your business stand out from your competitors:

1. Blog RSS Feed and News Mention.  Aside from creating a keyword-rich description, you can add more content in your company page by adding your blog’s RSS feed.  This works well if you regularly post new content in your company blog.

Read the rest of this entry »