Our senior director of information technology, Mark Braxton has over 30 years of extensive experience in systems design, technical architecture, convergence and delivery across multiple platforms. His core strength is machine to machine technology. You can read more about him on his personal web site here at www.urm2m.com

Read more about Eva HERE

Recently (and perhaps not so recently) branding has become a “catch-all” buzzword with definitions ranging widely based on who you happen to be asking.

The term “brand” is often misused by alternating it with design, advertising, or marketing.  All are indeed components of branding, but not the sum. These improper utilizations have caused much confusion in the business world as to what branding is and how it works.

So what exactly is branding? It is your company’s personality or voice that you present to the world. It can be authoritative, cutting-edge, funny, sentimental, hip or traditional. In order to successfully determine what personality you want to project, you must first understand your target market, competitive landscape and above all, your customers and prospects needs and wants. Every communication with the public – web, print or broadcast – needs to convey how your product or service provides a solution to a problem or challenge for your customers, and the value that your product brings.  Successful brands live within the hearts and minds of customers, clients, and prospects. It is the aggregate of their experiences and perceptions.

Once you make a decision on what persona you want your company to convey, the question then becomes “What’s next, and how do I do it?” A brand is composed of many different elements. Together they capture the interest of your customers and prospects. Some of the components are tangible and definitive, such as banner ads, direct mail, logos and broadcast or print advertising, but branding is also in large part intangible – ideas and emotions represented by visual and verbal communications. A successful brand will achieve the following objectives:

• Delivers messages clearly
• Differentiates you from others in your target market
• Offers a value prop/benefit
• Connects with prospects and customers emotionally and intellectually
• Motivates action
• Establishes credibility and promotes loyalty

Studies show companies that market their products or services without first establishing their brand identities are not likely to achieve return on investment. So before you invest another dime on marketing or advertising, think about what your company, product or service stands for. If you can’t define your brand, your customers will not be able to either and any marketing investments are very likely to be a waste of your money.

Mark is a leading expert in Information Technology, wireless communications, and global positioning. He has over 30 years extensive experience in systems design, technical architecture, convergence and delivery across multiple platforms. You can read more about Mark Raxton HERE…

Welcome Mark and thank you for bringing world class IT services to our team!!

In the words of Matt Cutts “The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings”.

In the event your website was affected by the update, I would recommend you have an SEO professional to do a thorough audit on your website in order to check all of your on and off page SEO which should analyze your back links, internal hyperlinks and meta data etc etc. Make sure that the company can show you samples of the work they have done and sites that have withstood the test of time with good rankings.

The moral to the “Google Algorithm update disaster story” is to always monitor your websites analytics, and the activity of anyone you hire to build your page rank.

By Jonathan Meyerhoff

Well as a guy who has been studying the inner workings of the Internet and search for over 12 years and someone who has also studied and practiced yoga and meditation for close to 20 years, I have! The idea of the Internet becoming like “The Matrix” is not too far fetched to me. That meaning, melding consciousness and the human element or electromagnetic force with the Internet, which would enable someone to virtually travel through cyber space and experience virtual realities. Also the possibility to be able to upload programs or
knowledge into the human brain could actually be developed! Instead of hacking through firewalls by manipulating code, well, who knows….

Whether this will manifest in our time or ever, it’s very interesting to think about. It is my prediction that within the next decade, we will see something arise that enables humans to connect to the Internet directly from the brain via some kind of API or application. This is just one more reason to build your own Internet empire around your business in order to have more control of your “Internet World” or Matrix. Having a website or blog is like having real estate on the Internet and the sooner that you build up your real estate the better. This is done through expanding your social media platforms, video marketing, article marketing and press release syndication, social bookmarking, creating a multiple blogs and establishing redundant servers or hosts, establishing relationships with complimentary high authority websites and getting links from them, creating websites for all of your interests
and connecting them together. The possibilities are endless and keep expanding.
So don’t blink…

Many companies frequently lack either the digital assets or the domain authority to immediately compete in SEO. Until companies can reconcile these obstacles, it’s a good idea to get PPC campaigns in place as quickly as possible.

Many Services + Minimal Bandwidth = Pilot SEO Program

This strategy is particularly effective for campaigns with a wide number of service offering or products. A hospital might have 30-50 core services that vary distinctly in nature such as endoscopy, mammography, pediatrics, primary care, and psychiatry.

The vast majority of organizations simply don’t have the bandwidth and resources necessary to create the content, imaging, video, web development, socialization, PR, and links required to rank for numerous service lines. Especially for organizations new to SEO (or ones trying to fight their way into a competitive market), it frequently makes more sense to focus efforts on less than a handful of keyword groups and start a pilot program.

Using PPC data as the backbone to an SEO Pilot

One of the hidden benefits of PPC data is that it brings great clarity to the SEO strategy. PPC campaigns have the benefit of providing a mountain of performance data in a short period of time. Within 30 days of running a pilot PPC campaign, a company can quickly understand the keywords that drive actual revenue, not just unique visits and rankings (which are meaningless metrics without revenue).

What Metrics to Look for

Look for ad groups that have strong volume-level metrics (high impressions and clicks), engagement-level metrics (high CTR, low bounce rate, and high time on site) and conversion-level metrics (strong conversion rates, low cost/conversion, high ROI).

These metrics should answer the following three questions that every marketer needs to know to be successful:

• Is there enough volume to justify SEO efforts?
• Are consumers interested in the business proposition?
• Is it possible convert leads/sales at an efficient price? (There is a direct correlation between CPC price and organic competition.)

Mapping These Keywords Back to Search

By this point, you should hopefully have an idea of your strongly performing PPC service lines. Next, it’s important to investigate the SEO landscape to see the level of competition for these types of keywords. SEO Quake is a great free tool that will provide invaluable data, such as the number and type of incoming links that facilitate top rankings. If top ranking competitors have an abundance of incoming links to the ranking page, it might not be the best starting point for a pilot program.

In general, try to find soft spots (keywords that drive volume and revenue without requiring 20,000 incoming links). Additionally, look at the type of pages and domains that rank within this space? If mostly news, strong brands, or .gov sites rank within the space, it might not be the right keyword to target for SEO.

SEO Now Becomes More ROI Targeted

Once a company has a clear understanding of the opportunity gaps that exist within a marketplace, SEO reinvestment suddenly becomes much less of a guessing game. It also becomes much easier to project financial gains based on the more accurate search volume. The question of “how much should I invest?” suddenly becomes quite obvious based on the total revenue created by search-network PPC campaigns.

The figure below is a high-level illustration of how one might strategically integrate this data:

As can be seen above, Keywords 13, 14, and 10 represent extremely high opportunity, whereas Keyword 6 represents great long-term opportunity. In this example, link building, content, and asset management should clearly take priority around these high opportunity keywords.

Summary

While PPC data isn’t perfect, it has the power to fuel SEO campaigns with the following:

• A more accurate understanding of monthly search volume (especially within specific regional parameters).
• Integrated ROI data for highly refined keyword research.
• A strong understanding of effective ad copy that can potentially be integrated in body content, title tags, and meta descriptions.
• Effective call-to-actions based on keyword type.

Here are 7 basic rules of SEO:

1. Understand User-Intent

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any SEO campaign. Understanding user-intent when conducting and selecting your keywords is critical to getting your SEO off on the right foot and helping the right audience find your site. For instance, are “gym shoes,” “sneakers” and “tennis shoes,” the same thing? For some consumers those three words are completely interchangeable. But if a tennis player were looking for a new pair of shoes, they would search using “tennis shoes” and expect a very specific result. It doesn’t matter how you would search for your brand/products, it only matters how your target audience searches. Targeting the wrong keywords because you failed to understand the intent of the search means you’ll miss out on potential traffic and customers.

2. Don’t Rush Your Link Building

It is crucial for the search engines to see a diversified approach to link building that slowly grows over time. A blended approach demonstrates your commitment to white hat link building and building your online presence naturally. The search engines are very aware that they are playing a game with spammers and black hat SEO users, and they don’t plan on losing. If you develop too many links too fast, even if they are good quality links, this can raise a red flag with the search engines and your site could be penalized.

3. Content is King

Content is anything that is public and shareable. This includes blog web page content, blog posts, articles, podcasts, videos, whitepapers and more. It is also the most important factor of a website’s long term SEO success. Content should always be written for the end user, not for the search engines. You have to remember that the search engines are not going to be the ones purchasing your products or services, people are. Optimize your content so the search engines can find it, but don’t forget that it has to be human friendly first.

4. Be Strategic, Not Spammy

This is especially important in regards to social media marketing and social SEO. If you really wanted to, you could create a hundred different Twitter profiles to promote your content through. But what kind of real value are you getting from those profiles other than a link? You don’t have to tackle every aspect of SEO at once. Frankly, there just isn’t enough time in a day to take on that much work upfront. Pick and choose your battles so you don’t overdo it. Flooding the online market with low-quality SEO doesn’t help build your brand or
reputation.

5. SEO is Long Term

This is probably the hardest thing for those new to SEO to wrap their heads around. SEO is not a quick fix to your online marketing. No, you won’t be ranking on the first page of Google for all your keywords by tomorrow, next week, or even next month. This is especially true if you recently launched your site. It takes a long time to build up your trust factor with the search engines.

SEO builds upon itself over time, but that doesn’t mean that once you have reached the first page in the search engines that you get to pack it up and call it a day. The Internet is continually growing and evolving. If you want to stay at the top, you have to keep working for it. It doesn’t take long for your site to slip down in the results pages if you abandon your SEO.

6. Follow Search Engine Guidelines

Google, Bing and Yahoo want you to do well with your SEO because it helps clean up their search results. A better SERP makes for a happier search engine user. Search engines are in the business of pleasing the customer, just like everyone else. If your site can’t help them do that, you won’t ever rank well. That’s why every site owner and marketer has to read the Google and Bing Webmaster Guidelines. Consider those guidelines your SEO line in the sand. If they call something black hat, then treat it as such and avoid it. It can be very tempting to test out the black hat side of SEO, especially when you see your competition doing it and seemingly getting away with it. Just don’t! Sooner or later the search engines catch on and your site will be penalized.

7. Integrate Everything

Just about all your online marketing (and offline marketing) efforts can be leveraged for SEO. One of the biggest mistakes you could make is keeping your actions in separate silos. SEO works best when it is incorporated into the mix, becoming an essential component of your online marketing. If your company has a large marketing department, don’t segregate the SEO guy back to the IT department. Bring him aboard the marketing team and you’ll achieve greater online success.

Article Written By Nick Stamoulis – posted in Site Pro News