Comments and Testimonials Add Value to Websites

90% of all people who are using the search engines are looking up products and services that they want to buy. Research provides the information that leads to a purchase decision. But looking at a list of features and benefits for a particular product is not the only thing that people research. Reviews of the product or the company selling an item also have a lot of pull with consumers. Comments that are posted online carry a lot of weight with the individuals who are considering making a purchase. Through the use of online commentaries and information that has been submitted by actual clients or customers of a business it is possible to learn about how you will be treated and what type of results you can expect if you choose to buy from a company to that sells the products or services you are looking for.

Reviews and comments that are posted online provide information that to consumers that is unbiased. If you are looking to grow your business you can promote your website and offerings by requesting comments, testimonials and reviews from the people who have been happy with the service or quality of products that you are selling. With more than 3.45 billion searches conducted online each month, there are a lot of people researching the product reviews that influence their buying decision. 

By adding the ability to post comments on your website, you can influence the future sales of your company. Before posting any review publicly, you can read through the submissions to make sure that every comment is something you want to post. Millions of people look up companies and brands online before buying. The added support of positive reviews that are posted by actual customers goes a long way in capturing the attention of potential customers. 

As you are building and marketing your website, remember to include a page that provides feedback and comments which will allow anyone who searches for your inventory to gain some insight into how well they will be treated. Consumers trust their peers when it comes to making purchases. By allowing comments to appear on your site, you can gain sales from the Internet traffic that is directed from the pages of a search result to your website. When a person finishes looking up the reviews about a business or a product they are interested in, they are ready to buy. Keep that in mind as you are marketing your merchandise and watch how many more sales you will make as people trust in the comments that they find while doing their research.

Comments Left on Websites Influence Search Results

Articles that are written in an unbiased yet positive format are an excellent way to help promote a business. By submitting content to any number of online publishers, corporations across the globe are finding that their rankings within the search engine directories is being influenced for the reinforcement of their marketing efforts that place a website in the resource channels of the search media. By targeting the keywords that are linked to the offerings of a business, the owners and managers are able to coordinate their tactics for driving traffic to their virtual storefront. Any increase their ecommerce sales comes as a result of their constant delivery of new material through articles and blogs that are of interest to the cyber community.

Another useful tool that is gaining recognition in the strategic placement of a website is the incorporation of comments or recommendations that are being made by clients or customers who are satisfied with their experience in dealing with a business. Satisfied customers favorably share the successes that are directly tied to the work or services of am organization that they have hired to help them. Service providers rely on referrals as much as they do their advertising efforts. The feedback that is given by their clients aides in the overall promotion of the business and its offerings. The endorsements that appear online add to the overall promotion of the company and assist in the placement of the website in the search directories.

Online marketing that includes comments and posts from current or past customers is a valuable piece of the puzzle that generates more business for a company. Websites that allow visitors to leave their comments have an influence on the search engines that rank a business based on the relevancy of the content and the links that support the work being done by the company. By soliciting positive posts on your site you can increase the ranking of our landing pages in the search engines.

Paul Cuthbert celebrates 3 Years of SEO Content

This month marks the official anniversary of my entry into online marketing as a freelance writer and SEM consultant. Three years ago in mid April 2009 I began creating unique articles that are appearing all over the Internet. Working as part of an outsourced team of more than 70 professional writers my work appears under the names of fictional writers that are credited with the work that I have continued to produce over the past 36 months. In that time my skills as a writer have improved and so too has my ability to type. When I started writing professionally I was producing between 35 and 40 articles a week, but as I have grown in speed and proficiency I now turn out between 60 and 75 unique and original articles that are used to generate backlinks from publishing sites to the landing pages of my client's websites.

Although I am prolific and to date have delivered over 6,500 unique articles to the online publishing community I do not receive credit for my work as a writer because my name is pooled with others that are also writing for the same organization that outsources assignments to me. However if you look up the names Art Gib, Billings Farnsworth or Johnny Wik you will be able to see some of the articles that that I written for hundreds of clients of my 1099 employer. For about 9 months the supervisor that I reported to also added articles to the web under his name instead of giving credit to the individuals that were submitting work under his direction. Although he is a credited author and has written many articles himself a number of submissions for my work can be found under his name instead of under Paul Cuthbert. (Legally that's plagiarism, but there's nothing I can do as I was paid to write and compensated for my work.)

As for me I continue to generate content for the Internet and work to help people with their Internet marketing by offering website analysis and optimization in addition to writing supporting content for the search engines to index and reference. With the knowledge of search marketing and my own brand of SEO strategies I continue to move forward as I am happy to working from home doing something that comes naturally to me. So to celebrate three years of working in Internet marketing I am posting this article to my blog as part of my own marketing media strategy.

SEO Strategies to Avoid

Last week I met with a man who had some questions about his website marketing. Although he has been paying out $500 a month for PPC (pay-per-click) advertising his business is not gaining from the advertising that is taking place in the search engines. As we chatted he talked about moving his online marketing from PPC to SEO for the organic results that will do more for his business than he is currently gaining from the money that is being invested in AdWords and other online promotions.

As part of the reputation management work that is supplementing the SEO strategies that are in place the company is doing something that I wholeheartedly disagree with. In an effort to gain customers and give the appearance that the organization is a success (although it is still a startup) the owner has authorized the creation of 1,500 email addresses and social media profiles that are in realty a sham. Without realizing the mistake the company is attempting to generate support through likes and comments that are made by their employees who are posing as customers. This practice is considered to be black hat and is not helping the company at all.

The reason that no one is taking notice of the false success of the number of "likes" is that the search engines know that all of the emails and profiles are linked to the same IP address. Even if the reviews are positive and appear to be coming from outside sources there is no fooling the search engines that identify each URL and email address by the senders IP address and location. Geotargeting is engineered to help customers to find businesses in their immediate vicinity, but it also works to provide the analytical information that the search engines provide to website owners to determine unique visitor traffic. So by creating 1,500 new users that are all using the same router and IP address the search engines are not fooled and therefore are not applying the results of the fraud to the page rank or placement of the site.

Even with the same IP address being linked to 1,500 different emails or social media profiles the search engines see only one unique IP address and that is the reason that a business ranking and links are not being recorded and tied into the statistics that build up the legitimacy of a website and add to the PR (Page Rank) of the URL. Even though the company's social media page might appear to have 1,500 "likes" from each of the unique profiles that are attached to the individual email addresses the long reaching effects of the Internet requires that a business conduct their reputation management legitimately.

As I listened to the frustrations of the executive concerning the lack of interest in the website and subsequent failure of their internal social media campaign I recognized that there are a number of things that can be done to review the website and make recommendations to improving the status of the site in the search engines.

Through the tools and techniques that I have discussed in past blogs I can help this organization to build a marketing media strategy that will get it to where it wants to go. But for anyone reading this article and thinking "I can fake some social media likes too," I have to say please do not stoop to black hat practices that will ultimately do nothing for your website and may cause more damage than good. Remember that online reviews and reputation management cannot be faked and success comes from patience and putting in the work that will build long term results. If you need a refresher review my blog about "The Tortoise and the Hare approach to SEO.”

How to Register a Website with Google

In this post I am going to give you the information that I used to register my website with the search directories. To be honest when I was looking at Yahoo I was redirected to Bing's website registration page, but once I loaded the information and received verification of the registration I was able to find my site on a Yahoo search. Which reminds me, that if you are building your own site or are having someone else develop it you will need access to the host server where you post the verification of the registration that is on file with the search engines.

You will need to set up a sign in or login if you do not currently use a Google account such as Gmail or a Google profile. Once that is done you can sign into the webmaster tools and add a website that you want listed in the search directories. You will be told that it will take 3 days before the spiders crawl through your website, but that is nothing out of the ordinary, a few years ago Google said it would be 3 weeks before they could get your site indexed and registered. The link that I used was www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

For Bing the registration process is almost identical to Google. If you do not have a windows live account or a hotmail or msn email address you will have to create a user name and password but that is not hard to do. On a side note: Because of all the sites that I am registered with I keep a word document with the site URL and the login and password so that if I forget it or do not visit for a few months I can still get into the site without submitting a change of password request.  So the URL for Bing website registration is: https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx Again they will ask you sign up for a webmaster tools account but with an email that is run through any Microsoft system you are automatically included in the tools account. That is good for Xbox Live accounts too.

So now that you can register with the search engines you can start to search for your website and see where you place in the results. Keep in mind however that optimization and online marketing allow the website to rise in the ranks and are beneficial to making the long slow rise to the top of the search pages. Depending on your competition and the number of other websites that are similar to yours you should plan a slow mediocre rise that builds your reputation and helps to keep you on the first page as you work on link building and other online marketing campaigns.

Optimizing a Website with SEO Strategies

It has been a few months since I contributed to this blog and in that time I have been stalled in working on my website which is the whole point that I started blogging about how to optimize a website in the first place. Now that I have launched the site I am already looking at what tweaks need to be made to the layout and content of the visible side of the web pages that are online. What I am not looking at altering though is the optimized side of the site that has been set up with the Meta tags that I discussed in early blogs.

Within the code I have included the use of distinct page titles for each page on the site and also a new description for the individual pages of the site. I did include the same set of keywords on each page and have also added the optimized page links that make it easier for the search engines to tell my site from one that has been coded with generic links.

Now that the site is up and running I am ready to begin adding the external links that will improve the page rank and placement of the website in the search engines. The first step that I have taken in this endeavor is to register the site with Google, Yahoo and Bing. The big three search engines that every smaller search directory pulls from. Although I intend to add the registrations to other directories over the next few months I have found that adding 10 to 20 listings per month is enough to make an impact without drawing the attention of the search engines that are looking for Black Hat practices in SEO. (As you may recall Black Hat practices are deemed illegal and carry severe penalties for websites that attempt to cheat their way to the top of the search results pages.)

Having told you what I have done I only think that is fair to show you how to optimize the pages of your website. This is the line of code that I used on the landing page of my website. <title>Paul Cuthbert | Marketing Media Strategy | SEO solutions</title> That one is obvious as the title is the easiest part of the page to produce. The title appears in the tab above the open pages of the website and is an important element of optimizing a website. It should relate to the business or the individual that is operating the website and can contain basis descriptions for the search engines.

The page description code looks like this: <meta name="description" content="Paul Cuthbert provides SEO solutions that include content writing, website optimization and reputation management relevant to each marketing media strategy he creates."> The thing to keep in mind when adding your own line of code is to change everything inside the parentheses (the quote marks). Remember that when your site appears in the search results it is this description that will be shown to people viewing the results. It can be a complete thought in the form of a sentence but it should be brief so that it fits within the space allotted by the search engine. Also of note is that if you leave out the description Meta tag the search engines will automatically use the first lines of text that appear on you page.

Finally the keyword tag was added to the coding which should be limited to no more than 20 words or short combinations of words that are separated by a comma. Here are only a few of the keywords that I am using to optimize my website inside the meta code. <meta name="keywords" content="SEO solutions, reputation management, Internet marketing strategies, online marketing consultant, optimization strategies, SEO strategies, search engine strategies, new media strategies"> These same keywords are used with the written content of the website and are highlighted in bold text to indicate to the search engines that they are important and should be indexed for a web search.

Next time I am going to let you have the URL's for registering with Google and Bing.

The Goal of every marketing Media Strategy

The goal of any online marketing campaign is not to gain a better grip on the search engines or place the website into the upper listings of search results. Although these are the results of a successful marketing media strategy they in fact are side effects of the actual goal of SEO work. No, the real purpose of search optimization is to produce increases in traffic from unique visitors and generate conversions of people that browse a website into people that purchase from that website. The fact that a website rises through the Search Engine Results Page(s) (SERPs) is a byproduct of a campaign that is designed to deliver a Return on Investment (ROI) for any business owner that is working with a skilled SEO professional.

Page placement may be important to some people but for the marketers that are working on building an online reputation the goal must always focus on delivering a high return on investment. First and foremost the work of any optimization campaign must deliver targeted leads to a business that is performing SEO for their website. While the positioning of the site in the search engines is affected by the work of link building and contributes to the page ranking of the site the more important aspect of any campaign should always be to the revenue that is being earned as a result of an optimization campaign.

 

All too often SEO companies focus on the delivery of where their client's site ends up in the search engine results pages instead of developing campaigns that turn site visitors into buyers. The work of Internet marketing involves a number of strategies that include social media marketing, site optimization and pay-per-click advertising. Nowadays social content is just as important as optimization when it comes to establishing a brand and developing an online reputation but underneath all of the strategies and tactics that add to the popularity of the website must be a reason that consumers should spend their money.

Internet marketing is designed to deliver increased traffic to a website, but the unique visitors that are being delivered by the search engines must be converted from qualified targeted leads that may be casually browsing the site to buyers that are spending their money. Even when a website is not set up for ecommerce transactions the conversions of qualified leads are the real reason anyone hires an online marketing firm to provide SEO services. Presenting a call to action that requires visitors to do something that entices them to open their wallets is what an effective and measurable marketing campaign is all about. By focusing on the bottom line of what will more than cover the costs of any marketing media strategy business owners that are looking for search engine optimization and link building can find the professionals that will deliver a return on investment that exceeds anything they are spending on their internet marketing budget.