First you create a LinkedIn Company Page (if you don’t have one already) then associate your employees with it. When you have updates to share ask your employees to share those updates too. Having employees share updates with their connections on LinkedIn can get your update in front of thousands of people who may in turn share it, bookmark it, Like it, link to it, etc.

How Marketo got their employees involved

After reading my article Jason Miller from Marketo got creative. Read how Jason got Marketo employees excited about participating on LinkedIn to help the company share updates and company news. Maybe you can employ what they did or something similar…

Read Utilizing LinkedIn to Improve SEO and Organic Visibility

Related Info

How To Use LinkedIn To Improve Organic Visibility. My article on Search Engine Land Mentioned above.

The post How To Get Employees Excited About Participating on LinkedIn and Sharing Company Updates appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Improve the visibility of your LinkedIn content with search engines as well as within the LinkedIn community.

Increase the exposure of your LinkedIn updates.

Possibly help to increase rankings of the web content you link to in LinkedIn updates.

You’ll Learn About…

How to Setup a LinkedIn Company Page and Associate Your Employees With It.

Have Your Employees Optimize Their Public Profiles. Having your employees optimize their profiles helps make the content on their profile more visible to others within the LinkedIn community and with search engines.

Have Your Employees Share Your Updates On Their Profiles. When you have important updates to share ask some or all of your employees to post the update on their LinkedIn Profiles.

For example when you want to announce that helpful video you put up on YouTube or that great how-to article that was just published ask your employees to Share the Update on their profiles. This can get your update in front of thousands of people on LinkedIn who may in turn share it, bookmark it, Like it, link to it, etc.

Having a company profile with associated employees each with optimized profiles who are active with a number of connections can increase the visibly of your content both on LinkedIn and with search engines and give you a effective online networking tool to communicate with hundreds or thousands of connections.

Sharing updates with these connections should help increase awareness of your messages and the web content you link to in your updates and possibly increase the rankings of that content as your connections share, bookmark/like, and link to your content.

Read How To Use LinkedIn To Improve Organic Visibility

The post How To Use LinkedIn To Improve Organic Visibility appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

• Improve visibility for target keyword phrases.
• Obtain traffic for additional (long tail) keyword searches.
• Helps attract more incoming links to a site.
• Assist in building awareness and reputation.
• Increasing targeted traffic from related sites.
• Helps make a website more unique and useful.

In this article I wrote for Search Engine Land I cover the steps we take with article marketing. These steps have been developed from years of examining what competitors of our clients have done to become the ranking and traffic leaders in their industries. Effective article marketing is a key strategy for many of them.

Covered in this Part 1 Article:

• EFFECTIVE Article Marketing Is NOT About Submitting To Article Submissions Sites!
• Step 1: Start Writing Quality, Useful Articles For Your Own Web Site
• Make it easy for your article readers to click through to related products and services.
• How To Find Article Ideas
• But I Can’t (Or Don’t Have The Time) To Write Articles

Read “A Step By Step Guide To
Effective Online Article Marketing – Par 1”

Part 2 will be live on Search Engine Land around September first.

The post A Step By Step Guide To Effective Online Article Marketing appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Here’s a video of Matt Cutts from Google answering a question about what SEO tactics to focus on for 2011. It was meant for large corporations but applies to most web sites.

In the video Matt covers a few tactics including…

Check your site speed.

First and foremost site speed is an important usability factor that affects your conversion rates, but as Matt says it’s also a “slight” factor in rankings

Get Started – See Google’s Webmaster Tools / Labs / Site performance for a Performance overview of your site and a Page Speed tool you can add on to Firefox

Get Control of Your CMS

Matt talks about the importance of having control of your Content Management System.

See for “How To Improve Organic Search Results With A Simple Site Audit” for more on CMS issues that affect SEO.

Internal Links Consistency

Matt discuses the importance of checking your internal links for 404’s for example,  but more importantly chekcing the site’s linking structure;  a strong ranking signal.

See 9 Step SEO Checkup Using Google Webmaster Tools , the “Gain Insight Into Link Strategy” section to help get started on internal linikng.

Participate In Social Media To Help Increase Incoming Links

Matt talks about participating in social media because if can help increase the number of high quality incoming links which helps improve your site’s rankings.

Start learning about Link Building here Link Building Basics: What is Link Popularity?

Read between the lines. Would Matt Cutts suggest social media marketing as one of the most important of three or four SEO tactics because of the affect it can have on incoming links? Or would Google like to prod us along on social media marketing for other reasons such as the realization in light of the Panda update that they need social signals to help evaluate what are high quality sites as well as the soon to be released Google +1 social bookmaking/recommendation button?

View Matt’s Video

Learn How eVision Can Help You
Get More Business From The Internet

The post Google’s Matt Cutts on 3 SEO Tactics To Focus On In 2011 appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

In an interview by Danny Sullivan both Google and Bing confirm that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on search engine rankings.

Read the full article by Rand at SEOmoz
 

The Benefits of Social Media Marketing
With this confirmation it’s time to update what the benefits of social media marketing are –

Some Social Media Campaigns Can Generate Immediate Business.

Interaction with your customers and target market. Helps Build Awareness & Influences The ROI In Other Marketing Channels.

Helps Build Incoming Links To Your Site That Can Increase Referral Traffic and Improve Search Engine Rankings.

Social Media Marketing Can Directly Influence Rankings.

For More Info

Ready for the Next Big Change in Google’s Search Rankings & Results? Caffeine: Fast, Fresh Results, Social Signals. Our article about the expected Caffeine update from last year.

The post Google & Bing confirm links shared on Twitter & Facebook have direct impact on search engine rankings appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Read 10 Ways for Small Businesses to Use LinkedIn

The post 10 Ways for Small Businesses to Use LinkedIn, By Guy Kawasaki appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Some highlights:

Deal a day

They engage their customers with creative copywriting, blogging, contests and social network updates.

Community forum comments placed on the web site: Unfiltered comments and recommendations. Woot staffers select the best or most helpful comments and pull them through to the homepage to help educate users with more than just the cookie-cutter item description  (You could do something similar for specific items to help shoppers decide to buy and help make your products pages more unique for search engines if you can add them in a search engine friendly manner).

Customer centric blog: Features daily deals. Also features fun, games, contests and industry news. The content on the blog is actually really interesting, The purpose of the blog isn’t to cram product down the throats of readers, rather to retain customers… something uncommon on most e-commerce sites.

Special content for Twitter followers.

 Read “What You Can Learn
About Social Media from Woot.com”

Related Info:

Increase ecommerce conversions 2-4x and improve search marketing results by helping shoppers decide what to buy

Most of the best retail ecommerce sites achieve conversion rates within the industry average of about 1.5 to 3%.

You can increase ecommerce conversions 2-4x by ensuring your company’s personality shines through on your web site, showing your visitors what makes you different and why they should buy from you, while helping them decide what to buy.

At the same time you’ll likely see improvements in organic search results because of the unique content you’ll add to your web site.

$1Mil to $1Bil in 10 years: Zappos. What You can learn from them

Zappos has grown from $1 million to over $1 billion in just 10 ten years by striving to provide the best customer service possible. Much of Zappos’ billion dollar business comes from happy repeat customers and word of mouth.

You can learn lot from Zappos on how to build a successful business, especially if you run a retail ecommerce business.

The post What You Can Learn About Social Media from Woot.com, a retail ecommerce site appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Zappos has grown from a little over $1 million to over $1 billion in just 10 ten years!   

“We’ve aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible. Internally, we call this our WOW philosophy” says Tony Hsieh   

Their goal is to position Zappos as the online service leader. Everyone in the company is trained in Zappos’ culture, values and customer service. Everyone!   

It certainly has paid off! Much of Zappos billion dollar business comes from happy repeat customers and word of mouth.  And at the same time they’ve created one of the Best Companies to Work For (2009 Fortune’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work For).   

You can learn from Zappos , especially if you run a retail ecommerce business (Zappos.com sells clothing).   

How you can learn from Zappos.com

Read This TopRank Article
An article posted on Lee Odden’s TopRank blog after Tony Hsieh’s keynote address at Pubcon 2009 gives a good overview of Zappos and what they do on their web site and internally to develop a customer service focus including:   

• 365 day return policy
• Free shipping both ways
• “above and beyond” customer service – even directing customers to competitors if they are looking for something Zappos doesn’t have
• No sales-based performance goals for reps
• 5 weeks of culture, core values, customer service and warehouse training for everyone

Read The TopRank Article   

Learn about their core values and how they build their culture   

http://about.zappos.com/ or   

http://www.zapposinsights.com/main/   

Read Books Suggested by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh
Here are some lists of these books   

Booklist: Zappos CEO Lists Books That Inspire   

 Zappos’ Library   

 New Zappos Culture Book . It’s not on the lists above. I haven’t read it yet myself. Still working my way through some of the others.   

Search on “zappos social media”
Learn how they did and DID’T use social media to build their business, including;   

“the way the company really builds relationships with customers – are the telephone call and the email conversation” Says Tony   

Zappos : Social Media Marketing Example #26. A look at Zappos on twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc   

Check out their web site, Zappos.com. Buy something
I bought some winter boots to start experiencing what they do first hand   

For More Info  

Increase ecommerce conversions 2-4x and improve search marketing results by helping shoppers decide what to buy  

Signup for Our Blog Newsletter

Stay up-to-date with eVision’s newsletter – You’ll get our latest content right in your inbox!   

By simply subscribing, you’ll be sent a weekly email that summarizes our newest posts (In reality it’s usually an email every couple of weeks).   

There are usually 1-3 posts in each newsletter that you can quickly scan. With a click you can read the entire article.   

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The post $1Mil to $1Bil in 10 years: Zappos. What You can learn from them (especially Internet retailers) appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Tamar Weinberg has a list of the “Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009” covering just about every topic including –

Social Media
Content Development
Video
SEO & Link Building
PPC
Affiliate Marketing
Analytics
Usability
Landing Pages
Local/Mobile Search
Public Relations

Webbiquity has a list of the Best SEO Tips of 2009 ( I made the cut for “6 Steps 6 SEO steps for a website redesign”)

eVision’s Social Media Service

Today, Social Media (such as Facebook, twitter, blogs etc) should be an integral part of a businesses’ marketing plan.

However the implementation of Social Media can be very time consuming, so eVision has a service to help our client’s with this…

Learn about eVision’s Social Media Service

The post The Best Internet Marketing Articles of 2009 appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

If you’ve been around search marketing long enough you may remember Google’s “Florida” update. I remember it well, those days in November (I forget the year. 2003 I think) when many webmasters in North America and around the world woke up to find their search engine rankings had dropped, completely off the charts in many cases. And this just at as the holiday shopping season was building up. Many were in a panic!

Google had begun rolling out a major update to its ranking algorithm, an update that was quickly nicknamed Florida.

It took us months to realize what we believe changed with the Florida update.  The biggest change – Google had largely devalued much of the PageRank (link juice, whatever you want to callit0 applied to incoming links from what Google considered low quality web pages/sites, possibly devalued PageRank from web pages that had clearly optimized anchor text, and apparently penalized sites participating in reciprocal linking schemes, link farms etc.. This lead to the dramatic drop in rankings for web pages that had been previously ranked in high positions largely from those incoming links.

Right now Google is testing a major update, nicknamed Caffeine. This update will likely start rolling out after the holidays, in January or February (Google having graciously decided to wait till after the holiday season to roll out this update).

However, this update has been running in one of their many data centers right for some weeks now.
 

What can we expect as Caffeine rolls out

Here is some of what can we expect as Caffeine rolls out and in the future (Some of this is from what Google’s Matt Cutts had to say at the recent Pubcon conference in Vegas, some from “reading between the lines” of what he said)

Faster indexing – Caffeine, as the name implies, will speed up Google’s indexing of the web, very much needed with the growth of the web and the desire of searchers for more fresh, even real-time results. 

Freshness – It appears that Caffeine gives higher positions for fresh content within the Blended/Universal results listings (see the More Info section below for more on Blended/Universal results). Matt put emphasis on freshness at Pubcon. I think we can expect Google’s search results to include more recent (fresh) and more real-time results high up in the search results as Caffeine roils out.

Note – Did you notice the real-time results Google has been including in the search result for a few weeks?  There was a box, for me it has appeared at the bottom of the page of results, labeled “latest results for xx”. It included real-time results from Twitter etc. I’m not seeing it anymore, but I think we can expect this or something like it to be back and probably, at least in time, positioned up higher in the results.

I do hope Google will start giving searchers the option to toggle off/on the many different types of results that are beginning to clutter up the search results screen (and maybe give us control of where we’d like them positioned?)

Social Signals. I think we can expect more social media results in the search results. And we can expect social media to play a bigger and bigger factor in the rankings of search results influenced by, for example, user reviews, sidebars (like Sidewiki) about web pages, citations (mentions) in social media sites like twitter and facebook, etc.

Moral – If you haven’t starting incorporating a social media strategy into your online marketing: You Better Get Going! See some of the related articles below on social media.

Web page load speed may become a ranking factor, not just an indexing issue, judging by the tools Google is releasing, or mentioning, to help webmasters improve load speed. Matt talked about this at Pubcon. Google is not only concerned with providing the most relevant search results, they are also concerned with the user experience when the searcher clicks through to a result. Load speed is an important factor in the user experience. Today, in Google’s Adwords PPC platform ads can be rejected based on slow load speeds for the landing page. So we shouldn’t be surprised if load speed becomes a ranking factor in organic results too. In additon, if Google needs to speed up indexing their torelance for slow loading pages will deminish.

You should be keeping an eye on load speeds using various tools and realize that the load speeds new visitors to your web site experience are often completely different than what you’ll see within your own network viewing pages that have likely been cached from previous visits.
 

Will there be major changes in rankings?

I don’t expect there will be major drops in rankings like there was during the Florida update, at least right away, but it’s possible.  Google has been very forthcoming with this update even giving us a chance to test it out earlier. We and most people didn’t see major changes in rankings.

This Caffeine update may be the initial changes to Google’s indexing and ranking system foundation which Google will build upon over months and years, so the intital effects on rankings may be minor.

On the other hand, however, we’re seeing reports of big changes in rankings over the past couple of weeks and it’s possible, since Caffeine is running in at least one data center, that it is a factor.

Don’t be too surprised if Google takes care of some practices it considers to be spam during this update too!
 

What should you do if you see dramatic decreases in your search positions? 

NOTHING! There’s really not much you can do or should do except wait to see what develops over the coming months (unless you haven’t been doing some things you should be, see below).

During the Florida update some SEO’s were taking educated guesses (some not so educated) as to what the new algorithm changes were. Webmasters started taking knee-jerk reactions, making changes to their sites in an attempt to “fix” their rankings. They were all wrong.

In the end those webmasters and SEOs had to accept the fact that their reliance on techniques focused primarily at influencing search rankings was the real issue.  And in the end what’s important now, high quality, search engine friendly web sites with great content that others want to link to and mention will still be important. You just might need to focus more on some things, such as developing fresh, great content and social media promotion, etc

Side Bar: I recently talked to a client considering implementing a potentially spammy link building technique, a technique that sounds like its main purpose is to influence rankings. I tried to convince them not to spend time and effort on something that at best may likely work only for a while and at worse could hurt them at some point. I suggested they spend their time on the things that not only pay off now, but for the long term. I was told, “that takes too much time”. Well, Sorry, you’re right. If you want to be successful at online marketing for the long haul then yes it takes time and resources.

For More Info

Randy at SEOmoz put together some other insights about rankings gleamed from Pubcon

Universal or Blended Search Results: What is it? Optimization Tips

Ready to get going on social media? Here’s some info –

Social Media Marketing Parts 1 & 2. A two part article on Search Engine Watch about Social Media Marketing

Your Customers are talking about you! And your potential customers are listening!  Many use social media to talk about their customer experience. And many research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes.

Where to put your blog for best search engine results

Blogging Tips: Promoting Your Blog, Your Products & Services, Usability Tips, Tips For Providing Useful Information.

More blogging tips – 25 Link Building Tactics to Improve Blog Search Ratings, Lee Odden

Ask for customer reviews. Good reviews = more business

4 Reasons to Submit Optimized Online Press Releases. Plus tips and resources for writing and distributing online press releases

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The post Ready for the Next Big Change in Google’s Search Rankings & Results? Caffeine: Fast, Fresh Results, Social Signals appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.