Hello out there in CMYKland! Today we have a special announcement for all of you printers and small biz owners. In case you missed our latest press release, you’re invited to an awesome FREE Google Plus Hangout on SEO for printing and mailing companies. I’ll be joining 2 well respected colleagues, Richard Dannenberg and Spencer Powell for this educational panel on inbound marketing for the print community.
Here are the important details:
What: 21/20 Marketing Hangout Live Broadcast
When: Thursday, March 25th, 2014 1pm PST/4pm EST
Where: Google Plus
To register and/or submit a question, please click here.
Tweet your questions during the broadcast using the hashtag #marketing2120
Not able to attend? That’s ok, we’ll have a YouTube video for you to watch after the live broadcast!
SEO best practices for 2014
It’s no secret that yours truly comes from a digital marketing background. Today we’re going to cover search engine optimization basics, which means that people of all levels of experience should feel comfortable participating. Besides, SEO isn’t really about technical stuff and traffic. Sure, there are things you can do improve your site’s visibility in search, but that’s only part of the puzzle. Real SEO strives to provide an excellent user experience on your site as well as social media communities and enhance your brand’s reputation. As you can see, SEO fits in with the rest of your multi-channel marketing mix.
With all the changes from Google lately, it should be a lively session. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share what I’ve learned with my fellow printers, but I’m afraid we might not get to answer all of your questions. I’m also concerned that you’re not aware of some important new developments in the SEO world. So I figured I’d list a couple of key points to keep you on top of current best practice.
Beware of unnatural links!
Google’s been dishing out manual penalties to high profile sites lately to send a warning to business owners about their guidelines. Manual penalties can be quite confusing and vary in terms of severity. If you’re not familiar with the term, Google issues manual penalties as a kind of punishment for spammy websites or those who violate the big G’s quality guidelines. The key is that manual penalties aren’t algorithmic; rumor has it that Google staff members actually review websites to determine whether or not the site needs a good slap. You will see a warning in your Webmaster Tools account should your site ever get flagged, but you must be vigilant about monitoring your inbound links. This counts double for those of you who have hired an SEO agency in the past and quadruple if said “agency” resides overseas. The biggest indicator of linking manipulation would be exact match anchor text. For a printing company, links pointing to your website with optimized keywords i.e. business card printing, print trading cards, etc. spell disaster! You will need to either have the webmaster remove the bad link from his/her website or disavow the link in Webmaster Tools. Exact match anchor text is a common violation, but there are other ways to run afoul. Here’s a handy guide to potentially harmful backlinks for further reading.
Be super extra careful about guest blogging.
Contributing high quality content to other websites rocks as does allowing good writers to guest post on your business blog. Unfortunately, too many spammers nearly ruined guest blogging for the rest of us. You can still post, but you need to be extremely cautious about doing so. You must exercise the same level of scrutiny for anyone who writes for your site. The safest way to guest blog is to no follow any links in the content or author’s bio. Otherwise, you’re taking your chances. You don’t have to go to that extreme unless you want to. For example, I allow guest authors 1 link in their bio because, hey, I value their contribution to our site and they deserve recognition for their hard work. I don’t accept solicitations from people I’m not already familiar with, although we do have a page inviting authors to write for us. I’ve yet to grant a request from someone outside of my social circles.
Focus on link earning instead of link building.
Building links might come back to haunt you no matter how careful you think you’re being. The easiest way to avoid any problems down the road is to let other sites link to yours on their own. You can attract links by publishing useful articles, educational/resource pages, and making funny, entertaining videos. You’ll have to get creative, but at least you won’t have to live in fear of the webspam team.
I hope these tips give you a better idea of how to craft your SEO and content marketing strategies. See you at 1pm on the plus side!