With the New Year many companies are trying to enhance their business and create a stronger presence online.  You should too! According to a recent article in Open Forum, there are eight easy steps to boost your website on a budget.

The following are our top 5.

1. Maintaining a blog can do a lot for your business. They bring traffic to your website, stir discussion and keep the public interested.  Blogging is as easy as creating a free account on Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. If you already have a Website, your Webmaster or marketing firm can create a blog as part of your site.  Once the blogging tool is installed, just log in and start writing.

1. Don’t hesitate to register with a business-listing site.  Websites like Bing, Yahoo, Yelp and Google can help your business with website traffic through search engine optimization (SEO), and help increase the amount of times you are seen online.

1. Paying attention to key words helps with SEO.  The more precise your wording, the higher the probability of increasing traffic to your website, and prospectively more clients.  You can also use the Google Keywords Tool which allows you to check for searches that describe your business and will notify you with successful and unsuccessful keywords that resulted from the search.

1. Watching your analytics also helps with your online presence.  You can register with Google Analytics and search your blog posts to see which are faring well on your site and what specific keywords were used to accomplish it. This helps see which keywords work best and what types of information are read frequently on your website.

1. Adding social media tools should be a priority in today’s society.  Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Linked in are just a few of the names we hear on a daily basis in public relations.  These social media sites are very popular and effective tools in creating website presence.

To read more helpful tips, visit Open Forum’s website.

In the May issue of Website Magazine, Linc Wonham updated readers on the recent disruption of “shady” SEO tactics in his article titled, “Grow Profits From the Farmer Update.”  According to the article, nearly 12 percent of all Google searches in the U.S. were affected by this change. Google is encouraging all online businesses to reassess its own content because of the change, especially merchants. 

Many e-commerce sites have seen their rankings slip since the change, without knowing they were practicing shady SEO tactics. Now the goal is that merchants’ content will be original, and this will help online consumers easily find the business and products they are searching for on Google. 

To ensure your rankings go up, start by auditing the content. It’s important to review all existing content from recent to past blog posts and clean up or remove anything that has errors, copied from another site or both.Then check the links. Linking your business to poor content will hurt your rankings.

Finally, produce great content. In Google’s eyes quality, originality, authoritativeness, presentation and value make for great content. Make sure you avoid misspellings, factual errors and outdated information. Don’t copy what users can find somewhere else. Lend expertise, make it easy to consume and that it’s visually pleasing and engaging for users.

Almost everyone you speak to seems to be in the process of a website redesign.  
They are recognizing website-of-old a.k.a. “brochureware,” just won’t due in today’s dynamic marketplace. 

A short read by Phil Edelstein appeared in a recent issue of Website Magazine.  One of the most important take-aways you will glean from the column is the importance of not destroying the rankings you already have with the major search engines by essentially deleting your old site completely.  Specific website pages that already garner good rankings for your targeted keywords should be maintained on your server in the background with redirects attached to them bringing the visitors to your corresponding pages contained in the new site.  This will ensure that you do not essentially lose the seniority you have already earned with Google, Bing and Yahoo.

To read the Phil Edelstein’s full article and for more tips click here.

 It’s interesting to see a traditional business magazine like Inc. grasp the importance of optimizing your website via a sound search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.  According to Inc.’s recent article, ”Even companies that do big business online struggle to be noticed by Google users….Traffic is directly related to your site’s rank among Google’s searh results.”

It’s important to understand how the search engines decide their rankings. Each website should consider important factors, begining with the strength of keyword usage and the organization and functionality of the website. 

The Inc. SEO guide is a great read and checklist for those considering a proactive internet marketing program for their business. For more tips, read Inc. full article here.

For public relations and marketing professionals, former South Florida social media expert Adam Singer is a pioneer for several reasons.

First, he’s a very bright social media strategist keen to show how social media and business marketing converge. He’s also one of those pioneers who’s OK with people re-purposing his content. With that in mind, today, we’re publishing one of Adam’s posts on why companies need to integrate social media into their public relations.

Adam recently was in Las Vegas for MarTech at the LeadingRe Annual Conference; he spoke on two other panels. Among the speakers were Guy Kawasaki and Scott Murphy.

Adam sets the stage: “…The MarTech opening session title is ‘Architecting a Social Web Marketing & P.R. Strategy.’ For this presentation, I’ve decided to dial down most of my content from the deck so that event-goers focus on my words instead of reading slides.  However, to supplement my session and provide the same content to The Future Buzz community, here’s a brief written summary of what I’m presenting.” (more…)

In that place where public relations and search engine marketing converge, practitioners have a long-standing understanding of the process: Infuse every press release, opinion and op-ed, advertisement, passage on the website, and other written text with keywords.

Keywords are the words and short phrases that not only define what your firm or client does, but what prospective clients or customers likely will be using in their searches.

For marketing communications pros from South Florida to New York City, the process is the same. Every document we write or Website we create for our clients is stacked with keywords, including those seen on the screen – and unseen in the back-end where only programmers go.

But has the process changed? A provocative new perspective has emerged from none other than the SEO Team at Google.

Metatags are a waste of time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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