Blue Tent Marketing

Over the last six months I have seen a variety of changes in the way Search Marketing operates. I feel it is safe to accept the fact that an SEO campaign will not show success by simply following guidelines given by Google (or has it ever?).

As the web continues to evolve at an incredible rate and search engine rankings continue to fluctuate like the latest DOW or NASDAQ, I find myself looking for new ways to encourage higher quality traffic on all levels of the web. It is certainly no secrete that content will help dictate the stickiness of a site, along with increase the ability to rank organically for valuable keywords. By adding one new page of content to your site a week, you are opening your doors to an increase in rankings for a variety of related keywords and more importantly, a refreshing user experience. Think about it – How much longer do you find yourself on a site that presents itself as the market expert with pages of relevant information compared to a site with content as dull as Carson Daly. This holds true for any site, whether you are a vacation lodging company or an ecommerce site, fresh and unique content will keep your visitors lasting longer than Carson’s career.

So how can you approach this seemingly impossible task? For the sake of keeping this post appropriately short I’ll just give a couple of ideas to get the ball rolling – and will expect you to leave a comment to share with everyone regarding your thoughts.

1. Implementing a Blog – As the criteria for Web 2.0 continues to grow into a user-generated beast, one thing is for certain – encouraging visitor participation and interaction with your site will result in an increased visitor experience. That experience may in turn lead to a link to your site or even better, a sale or lead. Creating a sense of community may take months or years to accomplish, but once your site is home to a community of visitors who demand quality content and who also participate with comments, your site will have seen tremendous growth.

2. Photo and Video Galleries – A Blue Tent client has recently taken the idea of photo and video galleries to the next level. Educational Housing Services has taken its visitor interaction to the next level by creating high quality photo and video galleries. After posting all videos on YouTube and optimizing the photo gallery pages, we have seen a consistent increase in traffic and rankings. Sites such as Flickr and YouTube are completely free and offer a reliable avenue to incorporate photos and videos.

As Web 2.0 continues to change the playing field for smaller businesses that focus all marketing efforts on the web, as will their ability to compete with larger businesses. Smaller businesses now have the ability to put together a creative and refreshing website on a modest budget. With the motivation and enthusiasm to create good content and the intellect to take advantage of products such as Google Analytics, you will be able to put yourself or company in a position to build rankings and higher quality traffic.

So what are you waiting for? Offer your visitors, customers or friends what the competition won’t – a refreshing web experience.

JG

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Visitor Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.