It’s a universal problem in today’s multi-tasking, 3-steps at a time world...so many emails in our inboxes; so many informational articles and worthwhile blogs to keep us in touch with what’s going on in our industry. But most of us share a common predicament… great information at our fingertips, but not enough time to explore it all!

Bloggers are Writers and  Readers

A successful blogger is not just a writer, but a reader of other blogs as well. We need to know who’s writing what in the blogosphere. So, how do we solve this dilemma of too little time? We scan! Admit it - you know you do it too. We scan for headings that grab our attention and we read segments of articles that appear relevant to what we want or need to know. That’s why headings and keywords are so important to our blog posts!

Keywords and Sub-Headings Make Scanning Easier

Every word counts when you are trying to create a blog post that your audience will take time to read or scan and come back to your blog for more. So don’t overlook the significance of keywords and subheadings to break your content into easily scannable segments.

These Things Are All Important:

• Relevance  - Choose your keywords carefully and make sure they are really the right ones your audience will search for to find you. Use the tools available that can help you with this, like SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool, which is free, and there are plenty of others.
• Placement  - Where you put your keywords is an important matter. Put them in your title, headings and subheadings. Put them in your descriptions and your image title and alt tags if you use images. Keyword-rich titles will make your readers happy because they can scan them easily, and they will make you happy because search engines like them – a lot.
• Density - It is important to use your keywords as often as you can for SEO, but keyword stuffing is so yesterday, and nobody likes a keyword stuffer. So refrain from overusing your keywords to the point that your writing becomes awkward, and your intent is clearly to use the keyword as many times as humanly possible in one article.

Making what we write as reader friendly as we possibly can helps our readers (and scanners) by providing information that is easy to absorb, and it helps us because they just might want to come back to our blog to see what other helpful information we might share – quickly, of course!!
 

Xcellimark recently redesigned the home page of the www.Accredited-Online-Colleges.com  website to make it more user friendly for the visitors. The previous site was about 3 years old so it was time for a fresh, new look to make the website more user-friendly and easy for visitors to find online degree programs at accredited colleges and universities.

New additions to the home page include the Quick Degree Finder, which currently ranks as the #1 clicked-on area on the home page of the website. The Quick Degree Finder helps visitors immediately jump to the degree they are looking for.

The left-side Navigation remained in tact, helping to guide a visitor’s search on the website so they can easily find schools by degree type (Associates, Bachelors, Masters, etc.) or degree subject (Business, Health Care, Technology, Education, etc.).

"Compared to other industry websites, Accredited Online Colleges definitely stands out from the competition. The site is a one-stop resource for accredited online degrees and colleges giving consumers the ability to easily and quickly find the course, program or college that best matches their interest," said Nancy Lambert, Vice President of Xcellimark.

Overall, Accredited-Online-Colleges.com’s new website was designed with users in mind to make finding information a breeze. The website is simple to navigate and provides visitors with a clean path to get more information about the online degree program or online college that they are looking for. Future design plans include a redesign for the internal pages, focusing on a layout change.

About Xcellimark

Xcellimark is an award-winning Internet Marketing firm based in Orlando, Florida. Xcellimark specializes in web design and development, search engine marketing and rich media, providing clients with the means to receive qualified sales leads using a skilled online conversion process. Through their unique approach to Internet marketing, Xcellimark has significantly increased its client's qualified sales inquiries and has helped clients grow their businesses. For more information on how Xcellimark can help you improve your bottom line, contact Scott Lambert at 407-678-3062 or visit www.xcellimark.com.

About Accredited Online Colleges

Accredited-Online-Colleges.com is a comprehensive directory of online education resources and opportunities primarily geared toward working adults interested in preparing for better job opportunities, reaching their educational goals, and improving the quality of their lives in general.

Many businesses and online marketers are happy to have their website rank once on page 1 of the search engine results. However, it is possible to have more than one search result listing on the first page. In fact, it is possible to dominate the page 1 rankings for keyphrases that are relevant to your business – keyphrases that your target audience is using when actively researching your products and services online.

Multiple Listings Gives You an Advantage Over Online Competitors

Multiple page 1 search results for a single business or brand dramatically increase the likelihood of an online searcher clicking on your link and being directed to your website or your Facebook page or your blog article. Also, having multiple listings on the first page of the search results pushes your competition further down or even off the page 1 results.

By completely saturating the search engine’s page 1 results, you build legitimacy in the mind of the online searcher within that search term’s category. It is a clear statement that your business is the most relevant and credible choice within your market and competitive landscape.

An Integrated Approach is Best to Boost Search Engine Rankings

Some people think this is just a dream, but this strategy requires an integrated approach. Google’s search algorithm now requires that businesses engage in a multi-facetted strategy that includes tactics that span diverse specialties including blogging, copywriting,  coding and programming, directory submissions and social media engagement. By turning multiple cogs, you can dramatically generate online exposure on several online platforms that pours into expansive search engine rankings.

If We Can Do It, So Can You

As you can see in the screen shot below, Xcellimark is able to dominate the page 1 rankings for the search term, “Orlando interactive digital agency.” It is important to note that this search term or keyphrase is a non-branded keyphrase. It does not include the word, “Xcellimark.”
Xcellimark has identified this keyphrase as a relevant keyphrase for those likely to need Xcellimark’s services. In response, Xcellimark has implemented an integrated online marketing strategy to dominate the page 1 rankings for that keyphrase. As you can see, Xcellimark-related search results make up 8 of the top 9 search results.

Strategic Optimization & Distribution is Key

Through optimizing and distributing branded content such as online press releases about Xcellimark, information from Xcellimark press releases ranked 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, and 9th on the page 1 search results. By optimizing Xcellimark.com’s coding and content, as well as building incoming links back to the website through directory submissions and content marketing, Xcellimark’s website ranked 3rd on the page 1 search results.

And by optimizing and engaging on the social media platform Facebook, Xcellimark’s Facebook page ranked 4th and 5th on the page 1 search results. All of these strategies resulted in compelling and effective search rankings and online exposure.

If your website and/or company only ranks once, or not at all, on the page 1 search results for targeted keyphrases, contact Xcellimark to find out how you can implement an integrated approach to online marketing. Our comprehensive and measurable marketing strategy helps you generate leads, increase business growth and enhance customer acquisition performance.

By now, you’ve probably seen some of the changes that Google is making to “provide a better user experience.”  With these changes come a more personalized search experience, but on the flip side of the coin is privacy vulnerability and limited access to analytics for your website.  Some may consider these changes good while others may feel otherwise. The important thing is to know what they are and to understand how they may affect your business and/or you personally.

So, here are the top 5 Google changes that you need to be aware of and how they may affect your business. 

1. Google will no longer give full search-query information to businesses for free. Google says the change in policy is to protect consumer privacy. But, for $150,000/year, Google will sell you all the information and analytics about your site that you want. 

2. Google is also making a big push to collect personal cell phone numbers.  They have released a new feature that requires users to provide their cell phone information before logging into their gmail account. Google will text you a code that you will need in order to login. Google says this is to prevent anyone from hacking into your account.

3. Google is moving towards consolidating all their accounts into one place so they can use that information to monitor your search behavior and provide a more personalized search experience. The Google update is called SPYW, which stands for Search Plus Your World. I’m a big fan of convenience but I am reminded of an old parable, "Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket."  I approach with caution whenever a company makes moves to consolidate information – the downside is that when you are trying to track consumer behavior, you will be limited in what you can track. For example, if you are not logged into Google and you do a search for "Orlando Catering" you will see a certain set of results. But if you log in and do that same search, you may see a completely different set of results. That’s because Google starts monitoring search behaviors and tends to show what a user previously searched for, making the search more biased and decreasing site neutrality.

4. Google launched a freshness update at the end of 2011. Google is now requiring website content to be continuously updated with new and unique information. Never again will we see the days of a "set it and forget it" website or the field of dreams website "if you build it they will come." For the sake of the user experience your content needs to be continuously updated.  One way to do this is through a blog that publishes on a frequent basis, preferably a couple of times a week.

5. Watch for Google’s changes in mobile search. When Apple released their iPhone4S with the "Siri" function, Apple took a chunk out of the mobile search industry. I’m expecting Google to respond with changes to the Droid Operating systems.

Google is evolving to keep up with the times and is positioning themselves to be the dominant force in information gathering and search marketing, whether it’s on a PC or a mobile phone. 

Get your website "Google Ready" for 2012. Contact Xcellimark for more information.

One of the main tools the Facebook community used to import their blog entries into their private profile or Facebook Fan Page was the Notes Application. It simply required your blog’s RSS and viola! - Anytime you published content to your blog, it would pull that blog post onto your wall.

At times the app was buggy and experienced outages but it always seemed to bounce back. But the next time it went out, it was gone for good. It was then that I started looking at alternative blog importing apps. Here are a couple of alternative third-party Facebook applications that I discovered:

Graffiti on Your Wall is a Good Thing

RSS Graffiti is a convenient way to keep your fans connected to the latest content published on your blog. After installing the application and configuring the settings correctly, your next blog post will automatically broadcast on the newsfeeds of your fan page and in the newsfeeds of your fans. Pushing content out from a social media platform is a great way to keep your business in front of the eyes of your customers – and in the process, you will gain some new ones.

Networked Blogs Connects You to a New Audience

Networked Blogs is similar to RSS Graffiti but it has a twist – not only will it import your blog feed to your Facebook Fan Page, but it lists your blog in a directory organized by topic (tags) and geographical location.

First you have to register your blog on their network, and then claim it. The claiming process can be a bit tricky and you will need the help of a Facebook friend because they will have to verify you as a blogger. Next, you set up your blog for syndication to make it feed to Facebook, Twitter or both!

While both of these Facebook apps make importing blog posts a relatively pain-free process, neither one should be treated as a “set it and forget it” way to push content out. It is still prone to glitches, outages, and things just not working right. As a Facebook Fan Page Administrator, it’s important that you stay on top of what gets published to your wall to make sure everything is working as it should.

If you need help setting up a third-party Facebook app on your fan page or if you just need an extra set of eyes for social media monitoring, contact Xcellimark to find out how we can help.