How to Write SEO Articles

Search engine optimization has become all the rage in the last few years as it’s proven itself to be a highly successful method of marketing for businesses of all sizes. There are two main types of search engine optimization, including white hat SEO (the good!) and the black hat SEO (the bad!). Unfortunately, many people fall pretty to those “SEO firms” who promise first page results in 2-3 months and you should immediately take this as a warning because NO SEO professional has the skills or capabilities to guarantee results.

White hat SEO is focused mainly on your written content such as page content on websites, article publishing, and blog posting. So we’re going to detail how to write a great SEO article/blog post to generate the most successful white-hate SEO results:

Be Informative

An article that contains 25 keywords is more than likely not going to be very informative. You want to write content that provides value to your visitors, provides information, and answers their questions. SEO articles and blog posts are the perfect way to show off your expertise and your passion.

Stick To Your Niche If you website sells yoga products and accessories, then writing articles and blog posts about jogging is not going to assist much with your SEO or Pay Per Click. You need to write about the content that is on your website. So you could write about yoga positions, best yoga accessories, yoga for beginners, etc. Content that actually relates directly with your website is going to get you the best SEO results. Use Keywords Sparingly

When you over-use keywords, your article not only loses it’s informational value, but it also becomes tacky. You can still use keywords, but use them naturally….you don’t want to over-force them into the article.

Length

Your articles/blog posts should never be too short, nor too long. You want to keep your articles/blog posts at about 350-500 words in length. When your articles are shorter, Google sometimes see’s this as possible spam and when your articles are longer, you could risk losing the reader’s attention or may not get website traffic.

Hopefully this article has helped in your SEO journey and don’t forget to check back to LookSmart’s blog regularly!

3 Strategies For Choosing Your Keywords for PPC

Interested in starting a pay per click campaign for your website? The first step in planning out your pay per click campaign is to choose your keywords. Of course, most people just immediately want to choose the keywords and key phrases with the most searches per month for their location, however, there are so many other strategies you should be using to determine your keywords, such as:

1. Limit Yourself

One common mistake I see when people are planning out their pay per click campaign is their tendency to choose keywords and key phrases with millions of clicks per month, but this is actually a horrible factor to use in determining your keywords because what your ultimate goal should be to NARROW your traffic so you get the most bang for your buck.

2. See Through Your Visitors Eyes

This is probably one of the toughest parts of choosing your keywords so it’s actually best to bring in an unbiased opinion for this. Basically you want to know what keywords and key phrases users are going to search for to find you and actually want to find you. It’s always good to bring in someone else to help you get an outside opinion.

3. The More Specific, The Better

Once again, I cannot stress how important it is to narrow your results as this will not only get much more targeted traffic to your landing page, but it will also allow you to get better results for your pay per click investment. You want to focus on keywords and key phrases that have 500 monthly searches per month – this may sound terrifying low, but it will give you much better results in the end.

Hopefully these tips on choosing keywords for your pay per click campaign have helped you in making better pay per click campaign decisions. For more information on pay per click management, visit www.LookSmart.com.

5 SEO Strategies For Your Blog

Anyone these days, no matter what profession you are, should be operating a blog. Even if you post little blog posts once every week or two, it’s a great way to increase your credibility in your profession, be found through searches, and of course, increase your search engine optimization. Here are five SEO strategies to make the most out of your blog:

1. Content, Content, Content.

Don’t just write a blog “for SEO purposes”. You want to create meaningful content that your visitors will actually have use for. You want to provide valuable information for your visitors so they immediately see that you know your information and they learn to trust you through the content you provide. By posting an article that has the keyword “search engine optimization” in it 27 times – it will be GREAT for SEO, but once you drive the traffic there, they’ll quickly realize based on the poor content that there’s nothing of use in the article for them.

2. Interact on Other Blogs

You should be finding the most influential bloggers in your field, and subscribe to them. Then you’ll receive an email notification for each blog post they publish, you can go and skim through the comment on them. But the key to blog commenting isn’t just to comment for the sake of SEO because usually these comments are bland and if the blogger gets even a small sense that your trying to promote your own blog, they’ll more than likely not publish your comment by pay per click. The key here is to actually put forth a meaningful comment that contributes to a discussion.

3. Use Tools (Example: Wordpress)

If you aren’t using Wordpress to house your blog, I highly suggest you make the transition over. Wordpress is a great tool, ESPECIALLY if you aren’t highly technical. Wordpress has many tools as well such as an exclusive SEO Package. Wordpress also allows you to involve social media such as “liking” your blog posts or “tweeting” your blog posts.

4. Utilize Inside Linking

This is a very easy, yet highly over-looked SEO tactic. When you are publishing a blog post on your website/blog, ensure that you have about 3-5 links from that blog post to other posts on your website. This is very much like link building and is great for SEO purposes. You can also link out to other websites, but the only issue you could run into with this strategy is if that link ever becomes broken.

5. Encourage Guest Blogging

When I say this I mean both offer guest blogging yourself, and encourage others to contact you to write guest blogs on your website. This is a great way to increase your outreach, build your network, and increase your increase website traffic. Usually when you guest blog, both the blogger and the blog work together to promote the guest blog which is extra exposure to your website/blog.

3 Tips to Optimize Your Pay Per Click Campaign

Pay per click marketing is a fantastic strategy for driving fast and targeted traffic to your website. You can narrow that traffic demographically and geographically, which is great for those businesses targeting locally. However, every pay per click campaign needs to be managed efficiently to ensure you are optimizing the campaign to it’s fullest potential. Check out these three tips to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck!

Pause Keywords That Under-Perform

When you choose the best keywords and key phrases for your pay per click advertising campaign, there are going to be certain key phrases that aren’t performing as successful as the others, and the best way to handle this is to simply pause those that aren’t performing as well. This will allow you to put that money spent towards the key phrases that are performing more successfully.

Conduct A/B Testing on Ad Campaigns

We all want to think that the one and only ad we design will attract our target audience and turn that audience into a successful conversion rate. However, that’s not how the real world operates. The best way to determine which ads are the most successful is to conduct A/B testing on each ad. You can experiment with words, images, links, and calls to action. This will allow you to determine which ad is most successful as attracting your target audience.

Optimize Your Landing Page

Now once you get the user to click on your ad, you want them to actually remain on your website and hopefully convert into a customer. You should be analyzing your bounce rates to determine how long visitors are staying on your landing page. You don’t want clutter, you want a very clear call to action on your landing page so the user knows EXACTLY what to do once they get there.

Hopefully this article has been helpful to you and if you have any further questions, check out www.LookSmart.com for more information on pay per click management.

3 Ways to Audit Your Pay Per Click Campaign

So many businesses, whether your small, medium, or large jump head first into pay per click marketing campaigns. Mainly because they just want all the traffic they can get to their landing page. However, if you aren’t getting any conversions from these millions of visitors, then it’s not doing much good for your business. Do these five steps to ensure you are getting the most from your pay per click campaign.

Analyze Your Campaign Structure

Just as if you were building a house, you need to ensure you lay the foundation of your pay per click campaign properly. Categorize your ads and ensure you are narrowing each ad campaign to a highly targeted audience so you’re not wasting your budget.

Analyze Your Ad Copy

Here you’ll want to ensure you are using keywords that will produce the highest conversion rates. You also want to ensure your ad copy is to the point and has an extremely clear call-to-action. For each campaign, you should be using 5 different ads all targeting the same keyword and then you can determine which ad is generating the most clicks and the highest conversion rates.

Analyze Your Landing Page

If you have the budget to do so, you really should test out 2-3 different landing pages to see which ones are the most successful with your target audience. You can play around with graphic design, opt-in/call-to-action, colors, and written content. Then after a few weeks, you can analyze the results to determine which landing page produces the most favorable results and increase website traffic.

We hope these tips on auditing your pay per click campaign have been helpful, and if you have any questions regarding your business’s pay per click campaign, feel free to reach out and contact LookSmart, Ltd.

3 Keys in Creating Strong Display Ads

Display advertising has transformed the online advertising industry. Paid advertising has gone from simple texts ads to vibrant graphic and video advertisements. This is also becoming a huge tool for businesses in driving traffic to their websites using creative’s. If you are considering setting up your own display advertising campaign, there are three keys to remember when you’re new to display advertising and those keys are:

Influence

The older version of paid advertising which usually involved text advertisements were primarily focused on attracting clicks, no matter why the user was clicking, that’s all the manager wanted was click-through. However, now that display-advertising opens up so many creative possibilities, the manager role is now focusing on how much influence they can have over the user. Businesses are focusing on how they can influence the user through these ads and create a positive perception in the minds of the consumer.

Bring Out The Creativity

Display advertising is much more fun aspect of online paid advertising. You need to focus on what graphics and media to use in your display ads that will succeed in grabbing the users attention in a positive way. Some display ads even have games built into them to create a unique experience for the user. The creativity with display advertising is endless, you want to create something that is visually appealing, yet not over the top filled with information. Pay-per-click advertising Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and campaigns are the primary way of advertising on the internet.

Beware of Content

One of the most common errors of online paid advertising is posting too much content or content that isn’t relevant. The main “catch” of your ad is going to be how creative is it, so the only content you should be including will be the Call-to-Action that you want your user to do. The key here is to ensure that you are not confusing your user. Your user should glance at the ad and know immediately what the next step is (i.e. Click for more information, Click here now, etc.). Hopefully these tips have helped you along in your display advertising campaigns and always remember that your design isn’t done once the ad is live. Your design is actually just starting once your ad goes live. Once your ad is posted live and begins getting hits, you want to analyze the conversions, bounce rates, etc. to figure out how to optimize your ad and decrease your bounce rate. For more helpful hints and tips on online advertising, visit LookSmart.com.

3 Elements to a Successful Display Advertising Campaign

Display advertising has turned text advertising into the older method of advertising. Display advertising is incorporating both visuals and videos to make the advertising experience more enjoyable and interesting for the user. Are you considering a display advertising campaign? Check out these three elements, which are key to any successful campaign:

Audience Targeting

You should be taking advantage of location targeting, geographic targeting, and demographic targeting. If you are a local business, you may only want to target those in that city or state. However, if you are an international business that sells clothing, you can target based on the behavioral patterns of users. By targeting, you are narrowing your audience and therefore getting more bang for your buck.

Visually Appealing Ads

Obviously in order to make a display advertising campaign highly successful, you need to have interesting content to attract the user. Video and visual ads are becoming extremely popular as you can design them however you like, and they are more likely to be clicked than the text advertisement. When designing your ad, you want to use colors that attract the eye, and ensure that your ad isn’t too cluttered all these thing very necessary to increase website traffic.

Call-to-Action

This is definitely a key element and unfortunately, it’s the element that most campaigns do not do well. It’s fantastic if you have your targeting narrowed down and you have a gorgeous display ad, but if there is no call to action, the chances of it being clicked through drop. A call to action can be a simple “Click Here”, “Get Yours Now”, etc. You want to tell the user what to do, they should have no confusion about what action is required of them once their eye catches the ad.

Hope these tips and strategies have been useful to you and you are able to get website traffic, the success of not only display advertising campaigns, but text advertising campaigns as well. For more tips, strategies, and to learn how campaign management can assist your business, visit LookSmart.com

3 Internet Marketing Avenues You Can't Ignore

It's no secret that ALL businesses, no matter what size you are, should be taking advantage of the available internet marketing tools and platforms in order to improve their business and gather more leads. However, based on studies and research, some of these Internet marketing strategies have proven to be more powerful than others. Check out these three Internet marketing strategies that you should be implementing for your business today:

Pay Per Click

For those of you who want to get immediate traffic generated to your website, using pay per click advertising is one of the best strategies to do this. Pay per click advertising is the act of creating an ad for your business, service, or product and then you can choose keywords and key phrases that consumers may be searching for and your ad will appear on the first page of results. You only get charged if the consumer actually clicks on your advertisement. This is a great way to get high quality traffic quickly as your website is being displayed in front of users searching for your key terms.

Search Engine Optimization

This Internet marketing strategy is key whether you are a business to business, business to consumer, marketing locally, or marketing internationally. Search engine optimization is the act of optimizing your website for keywords and key phrases so that you “organically” show up on page 1 of Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Bing.com. This is identical to pay per click marketing, but it’s permanent as long as you manage it properly. Search engine optimization is a great way to get highly targeted traffic to your website for free.

Social Media

There has been a ton of hype on this marketing avenue over the past few years and it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon! Social media marketing is the act of setting up business accounts to promote your brand, your services, get website traffic and your products through websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+. You can set up accounts specifically for your business and use these avenues to interact with your target audience, post promotions, and build awareness around your brand.