As The Seasons Change, So Should Your SEO

Almost all businesses are subject to some form of seasonality. For many companies, sales cycles and other factors are directly influenced by the changing of the seasons. For example a company that sells snow blowers and other snow removal equipment will have a boom come late fall and throughout the winter, but probably won’t have many sales during the spring and summer months. With other companies, seasonality coincides with changes in fiscal years. Accountants and tax preparers have their busiest months from January through April when the deadline to file taxes falls in the middle of the month.
What search engine optimization cannot control is the amount of search volume in a specific niche, which influences both site visitors and conversion rates. However, seasonal SEO can better position your website to reap the benefits of an influx in business due to changes in the seasons. Here are a few tips to help your business use SEO to boost peak sales cycles.
Plan Your SEO before the Season Starts
Take a dance studio for example. Registration for classes usually starts in late August or early September with classes starting shortly thereafter. If the studio wants seasonal SEO to help drive visitors to the website, they can’t start their SEO in August hoping it will have a profound effect on their end of summer registration period. Instead the studio should focus on building their SEO strategy and creating and promoting content in May or June (right after the dance season is over) so that their company is well positioned in the SERP’s and so that the search engines have a plethora of content to pull from. That way when parents start doing their research in August the studio will have a strong online presence.
Work on SEO Continually Through the Off-Season
The off-season doesn’t mean that SEO gets to take a vacation. The company that that sells snow blowers will be competing heavily for business during the winter months, but will see a lot less search volume and competition over the summer. The lull in traffic and sales is the perfect time to work on link building and planning your SEO for the upcoming busy season. Use the time off to build links, optimize pages, and schedule content out months in advance to avoid scrambling to build SEO at the last minute.

Hold on to Content for the Following Year
Search engine optimization, much like wine, improves with age. A page builds more trust the longer it has been online. Plus, search engines rank individual pages and not the website as a whole. This means the more optimized pages of content you have, the more trust you build with the search engines. Even if the pages you optimized for this year’s busy season didn’t perform as well as you hoped, leave them up and let them age over the course of the next year. That way when the next busy season arrives, your site’s SEO will have had time to build and improve.

From Nobody to Influencer: 5 Tips to Building a Successful Blog

Blogging is more popular than ever. Blogs are cheap to set up, easy to run, and can be abandoned easily when they don’t work out. This is both a good and bad thing. Conversations are better when everyone has a chance to make their point, but competition is stiff, and finding success with your blog is easier said than done.
Standing out in a crowd is a difficult task, but new blogs are started everyday that go on to become social hubs and sources of influence. Successful bloggers often have a plan and an understanding of what the right move should be. These five tips will help any new blogger find their way towards success.
1. Focus on Building an Audience
Every day, millions of people use Google, Bing or Yahoo to find information on all types of topics. Because of this, many bloggers start optimizing their blogs for search engines, and not for people.
This is an approach you should avoid.
People make links, share on social bookmarking sites and social networks, and they leave comments and spread stories by word of mouth. People make up an audience.
Look at two important resources for guidance.
One is Facebook. When starting a Facebook Page, one of the available tabs says “Build an Audience”, which is code for “run ads”. The key word is audience. An engaged and responsive audience is the most important factor in a blog’s success, so optimize for people.
The other is Google Analytics. The traffic statistics are presented as “Audience Overview”.
2. Learn the Basics of SEO
Your main focus should be creating content for people, but this does not mean that Search Engine Optimization is to be ignored.
There are a handful of steps that a new blogger should take to set up their blog for maximum search engine exposure without using shady tactics.

• Keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool to find relevant terms with reasonable search volume. Anything over a couple hundred searches is plenty.
• Optimize the meta title tag and meta description to include your targeted keywords.
• Emphasize your keywords in the content by using an H1 or H2 heading title tag.
• Optimize your images by utilizing the ALT tag.

SEO can be far more advanced and complicated, but the fundamental basics are good enough for most bloggers.
3. Design is King
Powerful and engaging content are vital, but an ugly design will never entice users to bother reading what you have to say. Take the time to find a clean and easy to navigate theme that is free of clutter and any other confusing elements.
Making sure that your blog is also set up to recycle visitors through social sharing and eventually email opt-ins is an important element of blog design. Take the time to measure social sharing and email opt-ins to make sure your design is optimized for both audience experience, as well as retention.
4. Master the Art of Writing Headlines
It does not matter what masterful point you may make in your blog posts if nobody bothers to read them. Headline writing is key to getting clicks from search engine users, as well as social media and (eventually) email subscribers.
Headlines are far more than article titles. Learning how to write effective headlines can lead to spikes in traffic and significant buzz around a new blog.
There are a number of resources to help you learn to write good headlines, but the best resource is practice. Before publishing an article or post, write several headlines, narrow down the best two or three, then work on those until they’re perfect.
Headlines are often the key to new blogs generating off-site discussion and achieving near instant success.
5. Be Yourself
It is fine to be a novice on some, or even all, of the topics your blog covers. Not everyone is an expert, and readers can tell when a blogger is faking expertise for whatever reason.
However, bloggers who are genuine and are obviously putting in the work to learn more and present useful content in a unique way will eventually become an authority on their topic.
More importantly, they will earn the trust of their audience and build a brand. When a blogger becomes seen as both a person and a brand, the ultimate success has been achieved.
Building Something Worthwhile Takes Time
Popular blogs do not sprout overnight. Not usually. To grow a blog, it takes a clear and focused plan, patience and determination to make something that others believe is special.
As a final tip, a successful blog requires a certain level of daring. Great design, slick headlines, and an engaged audience are all more likely to happen when you dare to make something great.

Search Engine Submissions in 2013

Search engine submissions have been on the downward trend since the early 2000′s. However, many people still utilize submission services to save time and increase exposure across the smaller search engines.
During the 90′s to early 2000′s, search engine submissions were the talk of the town and it seemed to be the fastest way to get a site indexed by the search engines.
These days, it’s a very different story. With the advancement of search engine technology, the time it takes to discover and index new web pages has drastically changed. Back in the days, it used to take weeks, if not months, to get a new site indexed in Google or Yahoo. But today, it can take as little as a few minutes to hours before a new page is indexed.
To understand the purpose of search engine submissions, one needs to understand what search engine indexing is. To be indexed by a search engine means that the search engine has crawled your web page and it has been added to the search engine’s database. Once indexed, links to your site may appear within the search results when someone runs a search for keywords related to your niche.
3 Ways a Website is Indexed by the Search Engines:

• You can submit your URL directly to the search engines.
• You can submit your URL to the search engines via a web program or software.
• You can let the search engines find your site.

In regards to the 3rd point, you may be wondering how in the world a search engine would find your site when you haven’t submitted it. Well, there’s 2 possible ways.
The first way is by crawling the web and discovering new links. If you happen to have gotten a link from a site and Google crawls it, there’s a good chance your site will get indexed fairly quickly.
The second way is more theory than hard truth. Some SEOs believe that when new domains are registered, the registrars share this public data with the search engines. A new domain registration would be the signal for a new website or just a domainer purchasing a new domain.
Either way, the search engines will crawl the domain and check to see if indeed there is a site there.
If you don’t mind submitting to one search engine at a time, you can visit each search engine individually and submit your URL.

• Submit to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1
• Submit to Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
• Submit to Yahoo: not necessary because Yahoo gets its search results from Bing.

If you prefer not to go through the tedious task of submitting one at a time, you can use a free search engine submission tool online. These web-based programs allow you to automatically submit to multiple search engines using a single submit form. Here’s our very own search engine submission tool.
If you’re in no rush to get your site found, you can just let the search engines find you naturally. Articles are like food for the search engines, so they love to find fresh and unique content.

How Do I Get Wikipedia Links?

We all know that links are an extremely important part of SEO. Inbound links pointing to your site are what help to convey trust to the search engines. Links coming from high authority sites are very beneficial. Perhaps one of the most high authority sites on the web is Wikipedia. If you conduct a search for just about anything, it’s likely that the corresponding Wikipedia page shows up within the first few results. Obtaining a link from a site like Wikipedia is a huge link building win, so how do you do it?
While it seems like it might be an easy feat since Wikipedia content is added by users, unfortunately the opposite is true. Sure, it’s somewhat simple to set up a page for your business and add in some links back to your website but there is no guarantee that the page will remain active. Each page is carefully reviewed by an editorial team. Wikipedia prides itself on being a non biased source of information where people can share helpful information with one another. It’s not meant to be another avenue to market your business with. So, if a page appears to be created by a business and is dedicated to promoting that business and its products or services, it will be taken down. Wikipedia can trace the origin of the page via IP address and if it was set up by a business or its marketing company and is overly promotional it will be removed.
Plenty of businesses have Wikipedia pages though, so what’s the problem? Well, what these businesses have in common are that they are typically large corporations that have a large user base that is willing to create content on their behalf. If an outsider (like a client or customer) is creating the page or adding content to the page, that is acceptable. While a huge, trusted corporation like Apple can easily get unbiased content written on its behalf, it’s doubtful that a small business owner can, which is why those pages often get removed.
While it may be nearly impossible to get a Wikipedia page active on behalf of your small business, that doesn’t mean that you can’t obtain any inbound links to your site from Wikipedia. It just takes a little more effort. The most natural and appropriate way to generate links from Wikipedia is to establish your business as a thought leader and a resource. If you are creating and publishing great content on the web that is non promotional, it will be linked to and shared across the web, on sites that may include Wikipedia.
Despite the fact that it is difficult to get a small business page to stay active on Wikipedia, you can try. Your best bet is to reach out to your community and ask for contributions from them, so that all of the information isn’t coming straight from you. That way, it’s more natural.