Lisa Parmley


+Lisa Parmley

How to Increase Website Traffic Through Content: A Case Study of 2 Security Guard Training Sites

February 14, 2013 By 12 Comments

If you’re working on building a business you need to keep pushing forward.

You have competitors. Some are building a better resource than your site. Others are creating a better product (or service) than yours.

And still others are working hard to promote their site more than you do.

The bottom line is no matter what type of business you run, you’ve got competitors trying to topple you. And they’re coming at you from different angles.  So you’ve to keep pushing forward.

We don’t have unlimited time, but over time, we can keep making improvements to our business to stay afloat and even come out on top.

In this article I’ll look at 2 high ranking sites and see what could be done to maintain and even improve their traffic along with ideas for improving their usefulness to visitors.

SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com

If you’re involved in the ‘make money online’ industry then you may already be familiar with this site. It’s owned by a blogger who reports monthly income statistics. Some of his earnings come from the security guard site here:

http://www.securityguardtraininghq.com/

I included this site in the case study since the site owner has made a lot of information on it publicly available.… Continue Reading >>

Why Magnetic Content is an Inevitable Part of Your Content Strategy

February 6, 2013 By 16 Comments

You already know content is at the heart of your SEO strategy.

In the past, due to many SEO loopholes, it was commonplace to optimize a page with very low quality, filler content and still manage to get it ranking high.

I think everyone will agree with me it’s harder to do that now.

Here are a few facts regarding SEO that are cause for concern:

1. Google owns a monopoly on search (some say as much as 90% of all searches are done through Google). So if you put all your eggs in the SEO basket, you’re basically putting ALL of them in the Google basket. One company controls all your traffic and that one company can take it away.

2. Google is aggressively penalizing sites for link building practices that manipulate their algorithm (which is most all link building just for the sake of building links). So if you manufacture the majority of the links coming to your site expect to see your rankings drop as they get more sophisticated at figuring this out.

Solutions

Here are another set of things to think about that will lead to a solution for BOTH these major issues:

Links on Highly Trafficked Sites Bring You Traffic

Make no mistake, there are plenty of sites online receiving an absolute ton of traffic.… Continue Reading >>

The Right Twitter Background for Your Business

January 30, 2013 By 1 Comment

Your Twitter background may be more important than you realize. Although we’ve all been told not to judge a book by its cover, people make snap decisions about your business based on your design all the time.

While Twitter does have several default options, including textures and background colors, it’s worth your time to set up a custom background.

At the very least you’ll want to include a logo and possibly even a little text on the background like what your company does. Give them reasons to visit your website.

It’s very easy to customize your background. Here’s a quick run-down of how to make the change.

The first step is to create a background as an image. There are hundreds of graphic designers drooling over the idea of having you as a client right now. So you can definitely find someone willing to design one if you cannot create your own.

Guru.com and elance.com are a couple of good places to search for graphic designers.

You can also try searching for ‘twitter background design’ on any search engine and you’ll uncover loads of designers.

High end graphic designers will design all the images for all your social media profiles. That way they can all have the same look and feel even matching that of your main website.… Continue Reading >>

Content Marketing Survey Report 2013

January 20, 2013 By 5 Comments

Are you interested in knowing how other marketers are using content marketing?

Would you like to know the benefits of publishing articles and videos?

In our first ever content marketing survey, we uncover trends and statistics on the state of the content marketing industry.

Why content marketing?

Content creation and distribution are at the heart of many marketing strategies.  These include search engine optimization (SEO) as well as social media marketing.

Both these types of marketing bring in large amounts of traffic due to the optimization and distribution of content (which can include video. audio, images, and text based content).

Content marketing differs from many forms of advertising.  Valuable content acts as a magnetic force for marketers and helps drive traffic as well as increase conversions with less friction than traditional sales pitches.

In this free 25-page report, we attempt to find out more about the use of content marketing strategies. Both content creation and distribution are examined.

Inside this free report, you’ll discover:

  • What type of content (articles, video, images, reports, podcasts) marketers are focusing on now and where they plan to head in the future.
  • The top 10 questions marketers have on content marketing.
  • Tools and services content marketers wish existed.

    • … Continue Reading >>

Is Google + Right For Your Business?

January 12, 2013 By 2 Comments

Summary


To get started, here’s a little information for you about Google+:

  • Google+ allows you to share updates, photos, videos, and more with your contacts and followers.

  • You can create and label groups of people into what are called circles.  You share a Google+ message with whichever circles you want. So you can send targeted messages to specific groups of people.

  • You can have as many circles as you like and put the same person in several circles. So someone might get all your updates, while others only know you professionally and they only get your business updates.
  • Google+ also has Hangouts.  These allow you to talk to a group of people (or even just one) using video chat.  You can add all the people within a circle to a hangout of just invite people individually.

Facts About Google Plus

Google+ was released in June 2011 and is Google’s social media platform.

Statistics show there are over 400 million Google+ users and that the number is growing fast.  In November of 2011, Google+ business pages were released which allow businesses to grow a following on this social media platform. Over 1 million business and brand pages were created in the first 6 months after its release.… Continue Reading >>

Create a Google Plus Business Page

January 11, 2013 By 4 Comments

You’ll need a Google+ profile before you can set up a Google+ page for your business. The profile is for you personally while a page is for a business.  Once you have your profile ready to go, you’ll be able to start a business page from within it.

Here I am logged into my Google+ profile.

 

Along the left, you’ll see a column of icons you may click on to navigate around your profile.  If you click on More, you’ll see an icon for Pages.


Click on Pages. Here is where all your pages will show up (if you have any):

Click on Create a New Page. You’ll need to pick a category for your new page.

You can choose from the following:

  • Local Business or Place
  • Product or Brand
  • Company, Institution or Organization
  • Arts, Entertainment or Sports
  • Other – Use this category if your page doesn’t fit any of the other categories.

Many of these categories will have further sub-categories. If you select Product or Brand, you’ll be prompted to pick a sub-category and here I’ve selected Education.

Then hit Next. At that point you’ll be prompted to create your new page by choosing a name along with a link to your website.  The name can be your company name, a website name, or whatever you feel fits.… Continue Reading >>

How to Create a Google Plus Profile

January 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Getting set up with a Google Plus profile is easy. The first thing you need to do is go here:

https://plus.google.com/

You’ll be shown a screen like this:

If you already have a gmail account then enter your email and password. You’ll be able to open your Google+ account with your existing gmail.

You’ll want to make sure you’re using a gmail account you have full control over. It’s best if it’s one you can use to login to all your Google products (like YouTube, Adwords, and anything of the other Google products you may use).

If you don’t have a Google Account or want to use a different one, click on the button on the top right. You can get a gmail account from that screen.

Once you’re logged in you’ll need to create your Google+ profile.

Google will auto fill in some of your information (like your name) that it will get from your gmail settings.  You can also fill in the rest and then click on Upgrade.

That’s really all you need to do. At that point you have a Google Plus profile.

After that step they’ll ask you to add people you may know through your email contacts. I’d skip this (at least for now).… Continue Reading >>

Google Manual Penalty Guide

January 6, 2013 By 7 Comments

Google definitely gives out manual penalties. This is not something new.

It sounds a little crazy with all the billions of sites on the internet that Google would ever manually look at any of them, but they do.

The thing is, they only do a manual review on the sites listed at the top of the search engines for fairly competitive keyphrases. So a site in one of the top 3 spots for ‘car insurance’ has a really good chance of getting manually reviewed. So this set of search engine results listings is probably manually reviewed:

A site at the top for ‘my favorite car insurance and why’ will probably never catch anyone’s attention.

And there’s all the stuff in between that may or may not ever be reviewed by someone on Google’s webspam team.

So there’s a limited number of sites that are ever manually reviewed.

Unless you’re actually good at SEO and go after phrases with some competition, you never need to worry about this (and may still not).

But, manual penalties are a real thing.

And there’s more to a manual penalty than just having your site de-indexed. You can have a manual penalty placed against your site where it’s still in the index, but it just doesn’t rank high for any keyphrases anymore.… Continue Reading >>

Link Building Tips

January 5, 2013 By 4 Comments

We’ve discussed on-site search engine optimization in great depth – including some of the different adjustments you can make to your webpages to make them more appealing to search engines – but these techniques are only half the battle.

Off-site optimization is just as important in getting your site ranked well in the search engines results. Off-site SEO techniques revolve around the links that point to your site from other webpages. These links back to your site are commonly called backlinks (or external links).

The thing is, if your site has no links pointing back to it from other sites, then it doesn’t look very popular.  Google wants the best sites ranking high. They believe very strongly that there’s a direct correlation between popularity and the best sites.

In fact, Google’s entire early algorithm was based on the idea of popularity (which was known as PageRank). Currently, PageRank is only one of many factors incorporated into their algorithm, but it’s still important.

You still need these external links.

Link building is hardly a precise art, as there are a number of factors that the search engines take into account when measuring the strength of the backlinks to your site. These include the number of links, the quality, the anchor text of the links, and all this in comparison with each other.… Continue Reading >>

On-Site Optimization Tips

January 5, 2013 By 2 Comments

As mentioned previously, on-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the actions you take on your website to make your site appeal to the search engines. These include actions like the words you choose to use in the navigation links, meta tags, and the words within your content.

Here’s a screenshot that shows a thoughtful use of the keyphrase dog training. It’s in the headline, the content (even used as a hyperlink) and over on the navigation menu. This site was ranking very high for the phrase ‘dog training’ (which is competitive). So that shows they’re doing something right.

Meta tags are snippets of code you can include on your website to give the search engines more information on what your site is about. Visitors to your webpage won’t be able to see this information, but the search engine crawlers that scour your site will appreciate the tip off. Here’s an example of what this meta code looks like:

Alternatively, you don’t want to frustrate the search engine crawlers by bogging down your site with loads of pictures and flash animations. Search engines rely on the words and phrases on your site to get a feel for what it’s about, so that they know when to pull your site up in response to user search terms.… Continue Reading >>

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