Words Are Everything
Tagging |
Tags are the words to describe your blogs, videos, posts, book marks or whatever content it is that you are tagging. The concept of tags has been with us since time immemorial - where humans like to place information in chunks and categories. In the blogging and online world, we too use tags to make it easier for us and others to find information. If you are running a company or event blog, we’d advise you to spend a few minutes every time you write a new post to add relevant tags to it. This little step goes a long way to routing interested traffic to you.
Tags are basically the meta-data that goes into search functions. That makes them important tools for bringing in relevant traffic to your site. So using them properly can be an effective marketing tool for attracting your targeted customers or readers from the internet. Almost all internet users use search engines - you just need to figure out a way to be visible when they’re searching for things that are relevant to your business. A few important things to keep in mind regarding tags are that:
- they should be short; preferably single words if possible
- they should be simple; in the easiest possible language
- they should be memorable; simple memorable words are searched more often
- they should be directly relevant to the content of the site/blog
- Don’t limit yourself by being too specific. E.g. write “fund raiser” instead of “charity fund raiser concert” or write “outdoor event” instead of “outdoor pool party for teens” unless specifically going after a long tail phrase you want to rank for…
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Inside Scoop |
The more regional and specific your words, the less competitive they will be, making it easier to get to the top of search engine rankings and the rankings of bookmarking and article marketing sites. As an example, “Billy Joel’s Beach Front Concert in Miami’s Grand Pavilion Hotel” may rank higher in search results, whereas “Billy Joel Miami” will be difficult to rank for at all but if you did, you would get a lot of traffic. If you planned your keyword strategy six months before the concert was big news, no one will own the phrase “Billy Joel Miami” in Google rankings, allowing you to consolidate it well before any other marketers can. If done right, you could secure all 10 search results on Google for that keyword phrase through having multiple content pages optimized for it, like a couple of blog posts, a video page, some articles, an aggregated page like Friendfeed with a mash up of Billy Joel content, some bookmarked pages and most importantly your event page where you would be selling tickets. All these content pages would be cross linked in a way to lead your prospects into your sales funnel. So when people start to find out about the concert, they will use the search engines and guess whose pages they will click into?
Also, please understand that words are important because they also indicate a person’s level of commercial intent. Someone who searches for “Billy Joel” may not be ready to spend money. (Besides this header keyword will cost a huge amount of time and money to rank for). Someone searching for “Billy Joel Miami” is closer to spending money on a ticket, but not assured. But someone who searches for “Tickets Billy Joel’s Concert Miami’s Grand Pavilion” has their credit card on the keyboard ready to buy a ticket…
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Where Should Keywords Be Used? |
Ideally, you should take some time out initially to build your keyword list. There are some free online tools that you can use to help you. Based on this list, you should set up your site structure, article marketing structure and your blog to make sure that your campaign is governed by the right keyword foundation. Even the pages that you bookmark should be tagged with these keywords in mind to elevate your account in the bookmarking sites as an authority on those keywords. Also, when you are linking to your website from other places, such as forums, groups, walls and micro blogs; make sure you use the link text keyword of the page title. Over time this will elevate your content network high into the search engines for all your words of choice…
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How Is This Relevant To You? |
Well, for starters, when you are planning an event, a keyword strategy should be carefully planned out for the year ahead to be able to direct traffic to it. This key word research should become the foundation of your whole online campaign. It can focus on entertainers, geographic locations, promoters and so on. You don’t need your own website to promote your events. You can still leverage off social media tactics even if you don’t have a purpose built website of your own. You can employ the same strategy to article marketing sites, Facebook pages and Events Listed pages. With Web 2.0, unless you have a big budget to employ SEO experts, a team of full time content developers and linkers in conjunction to a sharp web design team; you are actually better off building a web presence on 3rd party web 2.0 sites
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Use Of Keywords In Determining Website Structure |
Keywords determine your website structure and thus your web marketing plan and social networking strategy. Site pages should be planned in levels. The index page is at level 1. The page rank is determined by the number of links into and out of it in association to the amount of ranking retained after the linking back and forth (typically 15% of ranking evaporates when passed from one page to another).
Orphan web pages are pages that have no links into them. If an orphan page links off to ten other pages, these links do not carry any ranking. To ensure a site has no orphan pages you build your own site structure and your article content sharing clusters so that they share a circular linking pattern that ensures no pages are left orphaned. Imagine if the “Level 1 index page” links to ten ‘Level 2’ pages and each of these second level pages also links to ten 3rd level pages within a domain. When a domain is orphaned, its index page or any of its second level pages have no links coming into it, and the pages won’t even be indexed.
Now if all of the 3rd level pages linked back to the index page within this linking structure, then no page on the domain would be orphaned and the page rankings will be spread through all pages because of the internal circular linking structure of the site.
If you look at your web pages like a tree structure, the top pages should be optimized for the most general and generic keywords of your business. As we go down the tree, the keywords should become more and more specialized and unique. As an example, if your keyword is “camera”, your index page (or article) should be built to optimize for generic keywords about cameras. Your second level pages should all optimize for words about particular kinds of cameras. Your third tier pages should all be optimized around the long tail keywords relevant to camera brands…
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Words Are Everything |
Keyword research is one of the most important pillars in internet marketing and social media. Just think about how information is sourced to you when you search using Google, or how Bookmarking sites are categorized by tags. Let’s take a step back and understand a very important concept first. Forget the jargons - these tags and keyword phrases are basically just WORDS. Why is it that some words dominate search engines, while some don’t. Some are heavily sought out and some aren’t even given the least attention. If you can understand the power of words, you will be able to effectively increase your event marketing output significantly.
Two companies offering the exact same service can have different branding impacts based on the words that they choose to describe their service. To illustrate my point, I’ll share two different ads that I recently read in a newspaper.
1- “Joe’s building & renovation services - Quick, cheap and professional! (Charging 30% less for the same efforts and spending 25% more on sales and advertising against competition like)”
2- “Hand crafted restorations - Rebuilding homes using restored, antique timbers since 1982”
Even though, both companies can be operating in the same manner in the same locality, their choice of words distinguish their business philosophies considerably.
The emphasis on words is everywhere online. Google generates 10 billion dollars a year in sales revenue from their customers bidding on words! Competitors bid prices to have their websites advertised on pages of organic search results shown to people using particular words to find solutions to their problems. This chapter is dedicated to understanding these differences.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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