SEO your personal brand 
If you have ever worked with a corporate client or in a corporate environment you would know that brand management is something that is taken extremely seriously. The reason for this is brands are extremely important for companies. A Brand usually connects the dots from advertising to sales. This is because people tend to buy products from companies that they trust and advertising tends to create trust for a brand. Thus when people pass a popular grocer in a shopping center or on a high street their the grocers brand could attract you to visit the store rather then the corner shop. From this perspective companies directly link sales to their brand and the message attached to it.
Now in today’s world and with the emergence of web 2.0 it has become vitally important for us to control our personal brand. Why you may ask? Well you quite often attend conferences and networking session to promote yourself and build up contacts. This is a way of advertising your personal brand. Now in today’s age the online world has become so entwined in our lives that it is almost impossible to separate the two. Now what does that mean for your personal brand? Well in whichever stage of your life you may find yourself, you need to make sure you control what people find when the search for you online. Thus if you search for your name you should find your own web properties. For instance if you search for “Chris Calitz” you will find my personal blog with contact information for me and links to my social presence online ie. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.
Thus I have made sure people find info about me, which I control. This means I can then further advertise myself by simply making changes to the web properties I own. Now Emil gave you a quite detailed explanation of how to setup a Wordpress site but you need to take this a step further. You need to do some SEO on your website to ensure you are the first result in search engines for your branded terms.
Now luckily most of our branded terms are not qualified as very competitive keywords for instance “Chris Calitz” is not a very competitive term so the SEO I needed to do was not that extensive. If you do however have a name such as Richard Branson you might have a problem.
1. Choosing a domain name
Now the first step I would recommend is that you buy a domain name that contains your branded terms. So if your brand online and offline is based on your name try to buy a domain containing your name. For instance John Doe or Joe Bloggs would buy johndoe.com or joebloggs.com. Choosing a domain extension isn’t as important if your brand doesn’t compete with a competitive keyword phrases but if you are competing with Richard Branson you might need to make smart decisions. For instance if you are based in South Africa you could buy the local extension richardbranson.co.za, which is available I checked. This could give you a bit of a head start as you will be able to rank higher in South Africa but this isn’t a guarantee.
2. Finding inexpensive links
Now in SEO links are probably the most important ranking factor at the moment. Thus you need to build some links for your site. Now as this is not a difficult vertical to rank for you will only need a few inexpensive ones. You could search online for a few free directories to submit your site to which should ensure you have enough links. Some examples are www.sabest.co.za, www.dmoz.org, www.ananzi.co.za etc.
3. Deciding on anchor text and description
Now before you submit your sites you need to ensure you have decided on anchor text you want to use. These should be branded terms and should vary. For instance “Chris Calitz” and “chriscalitz”. These will be used for the text of the links you receive and they will be important in determining for which keywords you rank.
4. Lastly have content related to your branded terms
You need to ensure that you at least have a page with content or that your homepage has content where the branded phrases you want to rank for is mentioned.
This should put you well on your way to controlling your online brand. Feel free to leave some questions below and check in tomorrow as we will discuss how PPC could help you market your brand.
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Why SEO didn’t work for your website.
As a marketer of an online marketing company it is very sad to hear how many clients hired the wrong SEO Company. Some of my clients were told (by the wrong SEO Company) that SEO is part of building the website and as soon as their website is on the search engines it will be a week or two before they will be visible on the first 3 pages of Google. Some of them invested thousands and thousands of Rands towards building their website which includes SEO. Most of the graphic designers or web developers don’t have the background of SEO.
Every one wants to know how long it will take before they will move up on Google’s Search Results Pages. First you need to do proper research about the keywords. Your site might be optimized for specific search phrases, but is it optimized for the words that people actually search for. SEO will mean nothing if you rank high for search terms that people never use. That is why the research is so important to make sure you select keywords that people use to search for your products or services. It can take anywhere from 3 – 6 months for search engines to see any changes on your website before you will move up on the search pages.
SEO will not work for you if the SEO Company says that they guarantee page rank of XX, or top ranking in XX time or page ranking at all in a short time frame. Ranking is done periodically by Google, not on a daily basis, and nothing you can do will speed up the process. It can take weeks or months to get a page ranked and your ranking is also dependent upon other sites rankings.
Your site will be compared to other similar sites to determine relevancy and popularity. (By the way, page ranks are dynamic and not assigned one time and never adjusted. They do change. And, low-ranking pages can still appear high in search engine results, and high-ranking pages may not appear at all.)
SEO is all about content, relevancy and language of your website. It is behind the scene which one cannot see. We only see the website. If the language of your website is wrong, your website will not be visible on search engines and potential client will not be able to find you. The language can also refer to the “meta tags” of the website. The language of the website must be 100% correct.
There can be a various of reasons why your SEO did not work, but I cannot state this strongly enough: SEO cannot be done quickly unless it is done poorly. So be wary of those SEO companies that promise you quick results. If propper research is not done before work is done on your website, the chances are good that you might not rank well for keywords that perform well.
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Why use online marketing professionals to do your online marketing.
Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.
This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.
Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.
People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.
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How to create effective long and short term online presence.
If you have a business today, it is very important to have a website where people can view your services and products and also find out a bit more about your company but that website means nothing if people can’t find your it or if they don’t know what your URL is.
That is why effective online marketing is vitally important. It is essential to have a strong online presence and not be just another needle in the proverbial haystack.
The two main ways to create an online presence is through Pay Per Click advertising and through Search Engine Optimisation. Both of these methods work very well but each one has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
SEO
SEO is where the website is optimized to perform beter for certain keywords on the Search Engine Result Pages. It involves fixing the code of the website and optimising the content for the desired keywords. With SEO your goals are more long term, as it takes time for your pages and changes to your pages to be indexed by the search engines as well as getting a good rank for your keywords.
PPC
Pay Per Click is a type of advertising that is used on websites and search engines. You set up an ad that will display when certain criteria is met and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It works on a bidding system, you compete against other advertisers for the top spot. The placement of your ad all depends on what you are willing to spend per click as well as the relevance of your ad and content to the specific keyword you are bidding on. PPC is a lot more flexible than SEO because you can start and modify campaigns in a couple of minutes. You can see results instantly, so it is good to get a PPC campaign going while you are busy optimizing your site to perform beter organically.
The rest of the week these services will be discussed in more detail, so do come back to find out more.
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