This is a mistake that many businesses make. They create a website that is focused on them. Their goal is to explain why they are the best and logical choice to do business with. They talk about their qualifications and expertise. But this is just plain wrong.

The exception to what I am talking about would be if you are a celebrity. If you are a celebrity, then people do come to your website to learn about you. They want your biography, films you have made, etc.

What should your website be about? That depends on why your visitor came to your website. They came seeking some solution to a problem or need that they have.

Here is an example. If your company provided fertilizers and lawn care products, then your visitors would arrive looking how to improve their lawn and make it greener. They did not arrive to learn about your company or even to have the merits of your fertilizer explained… at least not on your home page.

Instead discuss what they came to learn on your home page. Discuss your company on the about-us page. Discuss the specific benefits of your fertilizer on your products page. This is all about creating a customer focused website.

Here is another example. If you are an attorney, then your visitors arrive looking for help with specific legal issues. Address these on your home page and go into depth on your credentials in the about-us section.

As you layout your website, remember it is about them, not about you. You will get a better response from visitors if you address their reason for coming and talk about what they want to learn.

When you start to perform search engine marketing and optimization for your own business website you really have to figure out whether you are attempting to market a business to a B2B or B2C audience. A consumer audience could very well read their email at midnight and purchase something but not a business audience. Your SEO efforts are going to be quite different depending on which type of person you are trying to attract.

Here are some key elements to look out for B2B SEO:

SEO Demand Generation: For companies that are targeting other businesses in a niche industry, often times they need to target keywords naturally within their content and the rest of the on site optimziation for keywords that have little search volume. This is when there are industry specific terminology that may not have a high search volume yet. But sometimes it makes sense to target a mix of both keywords that people are searching for and keywords that are industry specific that will grow over time. And even sometimes a b2b focused campaign can leverage (and should) other sources of online and offline marketing to help build new keyword search volume (and build a demand) within a specific target marketplace.

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I see many great videos online almost on a daily basis and it still blows my mind how some of these videos can be completely un-optimized when it comes to getting them to rank in search results.

Just randomly submitting a video without any thought whatsoever into YouTube or Vimeo and not really taking the time to truly optimize the components of that video submission is a big disservice to your online efforts to market yourself or your business through the internet. A video submission is like any other web page bouncing around in the search results and requires some SEO efforts to increase its potential to be found through search engine optimization labors. Often times a title and description of a video will act as the page’s meta title tag and meta tag description. If you use very generic or cutesy titles during your video submission you are only hurting your potential to be found by your audience through organic listings. Read more…

Business owners and website managers are always trying to think about what it will take to get good quality industry links pointing to their website (or link bait).

I’m not talking about the mass blanketing of directories I am talking about the nice, juicy link bait type of links that get people to want to link to your blog posts or website. You do have to be a bit clever to pull some of the more viral campaigns off but there are plenty of ways to generate good quality links to your posts just through traditional writing, it all comes down to structure. Read more…