What are the overall organization's goals that my Web strategy will contribute to? Are you trying to improve your brand awareness?  Increase revenue by 10%? Knowing what your overall organizational goals are will serve as a compass to guide you through the rest of the process. What measurable goals will my Web site need to reach to be successful? Do you need to generate 20 lead submissions a month? Double your newsletter subscription rate? Increase online sales by 10%?  When a Web site has specific measurable goals, you can measure the effectiveness and the results clearly. You'll know ...

SEO Made Simple Series: Part 6 As search marketing and SEO continues to grow as an important part of an organization's overall marketing effort, more and more smart tools are being developed to make finding and interpreting search data easier. Here are some of the best tools that I've found. Keyword Research: Tools like Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions can help you start choosing the right keywords to optimize your site for based on the content of your site and/or descriptive words you enter. Back Links: To see who is linking back to your site type "link:sitename" in a Google search. A ...

SEO Made Simple: Part 4 While crafting a successful SEO campaign isn't as complicating as fixing our economy, it certainly takes time, talent, and resources. When making the decision to do your SEO in-house or to hire a professional, take the following things into consideration. Time: Optimizing a site and building a successful SEO campaign takes time-lots of time.  Because SEO is an ever-changing strategy, time must be invested throughout the campaign for it to pay off.  If you choose to do SEO in-house, you are pulling one of your team members away from another task that may be vital ...

SEO Made Simple, Part 3 Now that you've wrapped your mind around the concept of SEO and how your organization can benefit from it, let's move on to the four core components of SEO. keywords First you need to decide on a manageable number of keywords to target. I'd start with between 10 and 20, which you will eventually need to widdle down to between 4 and 8. Put yourself in your customers shoes. What keywords do you think they would be searching for in order to find your company or service. Be aware of that fact that the way your company and your employees refer to your product or ...