SEO

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5 Ways to Find Topics for Your Blog

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5 Ways to Find Topics for Your Blog

Keeping a blog for your business can help you reach a wider audience and build stronger relationships with your current and potential customers. Keeping a blog can also help your business get found by search engines and improve your website's SEO and authority. You can keep a running list of topics that make sense for your business so that you always have ideas and information from which you can pull your blog posts, but you have to start that list somewhere, so...

How do you determine the best blog topics for your business?

Whether you blog weekly or monthly, there are several ways you can determine the best topics for your blog posts. Here's a list of five of our favorites that we use here at Silver Shade Group to create our own blog topic lists.

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How Do I Use Keywords on My Website?

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How Do I Use Keywords on My Website?

A couple of months ago, we talked about how to do keyword research. That post explains how to find your keywords yourself within the Google Keyword Planner. If you prefer, there are other tools available that will provide you with a list of basic keywords for your website for a fee. You enter your business into their tool and they provide a list of keywords that you can use on your site to increase overall traffic.

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Google Analytics Setup: Part 2 - Create Goals

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Google Analytics Setup: Part 2 - Create Goals

Now that you know how to collect tracking information using Google Analytics, you can create goals to track whether your visitors are taking certain actions on your site. Setting up goals will give you the ability to easily determine the percentage of your visitors that sign up for your mailing list or make a purchase. To set up a goal within Google Analytics, follow the steps below.

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Google Analytics Setup: Part 1 - Collect Tracking Information

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Google Analytics Setup: Part 1 - Collect Tracking Information

Google Analytics is a powerful and comprehensive free(mium) tool that you can use to gain information about the visitors to your website. Using Google Analytics, you can determine demographic and geographic details about your customers, as well as their behavior on your site. Since there is a lot to learn about Google Analytics, we'll be doing a short series about the tool that includes more than one post. We'll show you how to get started and how to analyze some of the data that you collect for your site. The first post in our Google Analytics series will walk you through the basic setup process to collect tracking information for your website.

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An Intro to Google Analytics and the Ecommerce Sales Equation

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An Intro to Google Analytics and the Ecommerce Sales Equation

Google Analytics is a reporting tool that allows you to track your website visitors and their behavior on your site. You can use a different software to track this information, but it's important that you track it somehow. If you manage a large site with significant web traffic and more detailed ecommerce capabilities, you might want to look into an enterprise software like IBM Digital Analytics (formerly Coremetrics) or Adobe's SiteCatalyst. For small business website data analysis, I like Google Analytics. It's easy to use and free if have an account with Google.

Research Keywords in Google Adwords: A Step-By-Step Guide For Beginners

Research Keywords in Google Adwords: A Step-By-Step Guide For Beginners

When you write content for your site, it's important to use the right keywords to help search engines and customers find your business. If you need more information about that you can read 'What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?' and 'Why Does Content Matter in Digital Marketing?' for details about how SEO works and the how your content can be used in other aspects of your marketing. A good SEO firm will provide very strong keywords for your business, but you can get most of the way there on your own if you're willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to research your keywords and do so often enough to implement changes to your site as needed.

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Create a Content Calendar

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Create a Content Calendar

Creating content for your business on a regular basis is incredibly important for SEO and provides more choices for you marketing messages. Google and other search engines reward businesses that publish content on a consistent basis. Consistency helps these search engines understand that your business is an authority on your subject matter. Creating content on a regular basis also helps to establish your reliability as a content creator and as a business in general. If you begin publishing a newsletter every Thursday, your clients and customers will come to expect your newsletters on Thursdays. 

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Develop a Content Strategy for Your Marketing or Website Launch

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Develop a Content Strategy for Your Marketing or Website Launch

Planning content for your entire website during a launch or re-launch can seem daunting, but you can plan ahead to create great content that brings the right customers to your site and looks great in your social media, email marketing, and PR campaigns.

The first step to create quality content for your site is to research the keywords that are relevant for your business. You can research keywords in Google Adwords by searching for your business or product. 

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization means helping search engines direct visitors to your site by using words that are relevant for your business and the search terms that users type into a search engine, like Bing or Google. These search terms are also called keywords.

Optimizing your site for search helps the search engines determine which keywords are most relevant for your website and your business. Search engines use many factors to help them return the best results for their customers. 

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Why Does Content Matter in Digital Marketing?

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Why Does Content Matter in Digital Marketing?

Good content can help your website to become search engine optimization (SEO) friendly. Your content should reflect the products or services your business offers, articles or tips that are helpful to your audience, and information your customers use make a purchase decision.

Simply put, Google (and other search engines) aims to return the most helpful results for each search. Google wants each person conducting a search to find results that are helpful so that they go back to Google for their future searches. Each Google update changes their algorithm slightly to ensure that the best results are returned for each search.