Content is the foundation of SEO.

The purpose of an SEO campaign is to drive visitors to your website. But why do you want to do that? So they can see your content, of course.

• Without content, you don’t have a website.
• With lousy content (visually poor, grammatical errors, keyword stuffing, lack of organization) you have a website that chases people  away.
• With ineffective content you have a website that fails to convert visitors into paying customers.
• With effective content your website becomes a powerful sales tool.

But that’s not the only kind of content that’s important. You may not have realized it, but you have off-site content, too. That’s content in other places that helps promote your brand and direct potential customers to your website. What kind of content is that specifically? How about this:

• Articles and white papers posted on other sites.
• Online press releases.
• An email newsletter. (Sign up for ours!)
• Blog posts you write that are syndicated at one or more other blogs.
• Twitter mentions.
• Mentions at other social media like Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn and others.
• Mentions and links from other websites related to yours.

Is your content good enough for effective SEO?

How good is the copy on your site? You have to start there because everything else drives people to your on-site copy. Is it unique? Does it provide value by providing non-obvious information and answering questions? Is it interesting to read? Is it literate? Does it funnel visitors toward a buying decision? If not, have you considered hiring a professional copywriter?

Do you have the necessary off-site copy? This is one of the most forgotten factors in SEO. You need a strong presence in as many off-site places as possible to build your link popularity and to drive more visitors to your website.

Once you’ve considered all that, you may decide you need professional help with your SEO. If so, talk to us.

Google is not just counting links for their local search results in Google Places. Now they’re counting citations, too.

Links, as we all know, are important for organic search rankings. A citation is a mention of a company or website that’s not clickable as a link. It’s just a mention.

Many of us considered them worthless insofar as search engine visibility goes, but that’s not the case anymore. Citations in places like YellowPages.com, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Localeze and others can give your local search listing (the one associated with a map) a significant boost.

We’ve found a handy list of 20 excellent websites where you can easily get citations. Some of them allow customer reviews, too. Encourage your most delighted customers to go and write reviews once you have a listing there. Just remember not to write rave reviews yourself; you’re likely to get caught at that.

Using Twitter to full advantage allows you to fully engage with customers and prospects. In a recent book entitled 100 Inbound Marketing Content Ideas by the folks at HubSpot, they include what they call 34 Awesome Twitter Ideas. Here are some I thought were particularly good.

• Twitter can allow you to respond to customer/prospect questions, and put forward a friendly personality for your company.
• Check your @replies regularly with a Twitter client. Reply to your users’ questions.
• Posts tweets of your blog posts.
• Thank people who comment on your blog posts.
• Write in the first person; that shows a real person is behind the Twitter account.
• If your blog post is a list of tips, post one as a teaser in your tweet.
• If you have older blog posts that are still relevant, tweet them again from time to time for those who missed them the first time around.

You can download the whole book for these and other tips for Twitter, Facebook and your blog here.

Leverage Your Blog

Once you have a blog, you can easily leverage it to spread your brand, gain you authority in your field, and greatly improve your visibility on the Internet. Here are six reasons a blog will pay you back all out of proportion to the effort it takes to maintain it.

1. Interact with clients & prospects. Write provocative posts that generate comments and questions. You can respond and establish both authority and accessibility at the same time.
2. Gain Directory Links. You can list your blog in perhaps two dozen blog directories. If your blog is hosted on your website domain (it should be!) then all those links  help your website’s link popularity. See Bloggapedia, Blogarama,  Technorati, and BlogHub.
3. Syndication Possibilities – other blogs may re-post your blog posts for their readers, dramatically extending your range of influence. Plus you get backlinks that hepl your website rankings.
4. Social Media Exposure — You can set up your blog so every post automatically gets listed on your Facebook Fan Page. The preiodic updates there keep your fans engaged. You can also easily post a link to your blog post at other social media sites: Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, LinkedIn, Merchant Circle and so forth. That expands your reach and also generates backlinks.
5. Real Time Exposure via Twitter. Tweet each blog post as you publish it to get the word out to your followers. Others interested in what you do will find you and follow you. You can see ours here.
6. You can even push your blog out on Kindle and actually earn money when people subscribe to it! (Look up the Rank Magic Blog on your Kindle for a good example.)

Yes, having a blog takes a certain amount of discipline to write at least one good post a month, but it can rally pay off in your branding and your visibility on the web. We can share some time-saving and labor-saving ideas that we’ve put into practice for our own blog. Call and ask how we can help.

Great reviews at places like Google Local and Yelp can help your search engine rankings and encourage shoppers to buy your products or services. Is it any wonder, then, that some businesses have succumbed to the temptation of soliciting fake rave reviews? Of course not. And a mini-industry has appeared to satisfy that temptation.

5-Star Reviews

The more fake 5-star reviews that are handed out, the more you need to rise above the competition. It’s like an arms race in counterfeit superlatives.

The New York Times recently wrote about an attempt to deal with this.

Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.

Google?

I’m sure Google is working on this as well. In my opinion, trafficking in mendacious online reviews will come to bite you in the butt. Google is very unlikely to stop at disregarding the fake reviews it finds — more likely it will penalize the site employing such tactics. Back in 2006 we wrote about Ricoh and BMW cheating for higher rankings and getting completely banned from Google for more than six months.

We don’t know if Google has fake review detection in place, or how effective it is, but you can rest assured that they will develop a very effective system for it in the future. And when they do, a lot of websites will suffer for employing those dishonest tactics.

Your website can’t afford a serious Google slap-down.

Some may be tempted to create fake reviews to dampen the effect of a negative review that appears about their company online. Don’t. There are better ways to deal with negative reviews, though, some of which we discussed in this blog last year. If you feel you really need some good reviews to counter the bad press, ask your most delighted customers to give you a review — but make sure they do it in their own words.

In a recent video by Matt Cutts, “The Google Guy”, he answers a question about the top three things an in-house SEO should focus on. They were:

• Improve page speed because the faster your pages download, the more visitor interaction occurs and the more likely a visitor is to convert to a paying customer.
• Make sure internal linking is done well, with appropriate keywords in link text, but not so much that it’s spammy. Also make sure you have no broken links. (We check our client sites monthly for that.)
• Invest time and effort in social media marketing.

It’s the last one I want to focus on here, and if you watch the video, it starts in the middle of Matt’s response, just where he starts to talk about social media marketing. The point is that once you have great content on your site, social media marketing will expose your site to many more people. Links from various social media outlets help your link popularity, people who visit your site as a result might link to it, and all that will help both your search engine rankings and your overall visibility.

Matt mentions some of our favorite social media sites; here’s a list for you to consider:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Digg
• Delicious
• StumbeUpon

We have found social media marketing well worth the attention it requires. For example, we make sure to send each new blog post to all of the above social sites, and we’re finding dramatically increased participation as a result, getting comments on our blog posts from all over the world.

Check out Matt’s video advice.

Google introduced its new +1 button today, as part of its foray into social media in response to major email inroads from Facebook. It allows people to click on it to register a vote in favor of a web page or blog post, much the way they can now click a Facebook “like” button.

Google has stated that they will use +1 activity as another one of the many factors they use to rank websites; the more +1 votes you get, the better.

CNet previewed the new button about a month ago, with a prospective overview, and even the Wall Street Journal expressed early interest.

Webmasters are right now scrambling to figure out how to place and use the new +1 button. We hope to have it live on our site and blog soon. When you see it, please click on it so we can evaluate just what it does to rankings and visibility in general.

According to WebProNews, Google and Bing are both closely watching activity on Twitter and Facebook. The more people buzz about you and your website, the better your online reputation and link popularity.

Links from prominent people (“authorities”) count more in your favor. So if you get prominent followers and visitors who are motivated to post or tweet about what you’re doing and what’s on your website, Google & Bing will notice.

More at WebProNews.

Negative reviews are hurtful to your pride and your business. Enough so that a whole new industry has sprung up: “:reputation management”. But if someone posts a negative review on your Facebook fan page (you do have one of those, right?) you will be tempted to immediately delete it. Don’t.

Lisa Barone, of Outspoken Media,  has written about five excellent reasons to leave those negative expressions in place, and how to leverage that to your advantage. Here they are, but you need to read Lisa’s article for a full understanding.

1. You want the conversation to happen at home
2. It’s a chance to change the conversation
3. You get to show off your customer service
4. Gives you street cred
5. You get feedback you can act on

You certainly don’t want to encourage negative reviews, but if you respond properly you can turn them into a positive experience for everyone.

Share any web page you’re reading with your friends and followers at almost any social media site – instantly from the new Google Toolbar. It also automatically shortens the URL using goo.gl … similar to bit.ly, but faster & easier. That’s important for tweets with its limited character count.

We use it to share our blog posts and to post interesting stuff to our Facebook page or to tweet it. I’ve been very pleased with this new feature and encourage you to try it out.

To learn more, Google has a full description and a video demonstration.