SEO Hosting Blog

Successful companies know what their competitors are up to at any moment. They use their knowledge of the competition to help develop a strategy for crushing them. How well do you now your competition? Here are 5 things your can learn from your competitors to better prepare your business to compete with them in the online market.

1. Keywords they are targeting- Understanding which keywords your competitors are targeting gives you a clearer idea of how competitive your industry is online. This isn’t to say you should directly lift your competitors’ keywords, but knowing the phrases they think customers are typing into the search engines is important because it allows you to create a well rounded keyword list. Perform your own keyword research on their key phrases to determine which phrases are worth using.
2. Keywords they aren’t targeting- Even more important than the keywords your competition is targeting are the ones they aren’t. One easy way to do this is to enter the urls of your competition into the Google Adwords keyword tool. The tool will then suggest additional keywords for those sites to target. Find the most effective keywords that they aren’t currently using on their website, and you will be able to make a splash on the SERPs.
3. Who’s linking to them- Many website owners say link building is the hardest part of their internet marketing efforts. A good place to start your link building campaign is to study your competitor’s inbound links. I prefer using Yahoo as an easy way to look at backlinks. Simply enter linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorssite.com  to find info on your competitors backlinks.
4. Their PPC techniques- If you plan on launching a PPC campaign, you can learn a lot from your competition. Search for keywords, and see which competitors are bidding on the PPC terms. You can get a better overall analysis of your competition’s PPC strategies by letting an SEO company handle the work for you.
5. Their off site efforts- What else are your competitors doing besides their main website? Search for their names in Google, and see what comes up. If they have a strong Internet marketing plan, you’ll likely find them in social networks, article directories, press release websites, forums, and blogs. Take note of where your competitors are placing their marketing efforts. It will help you come up with a plan for surpassing them.

Common in the insurance business you will hear things like the 80/20 plan. What that means is some insurance plans will cover 80% of the bill while leaving you with the remaining 20% balance. With Internet marketing, I have coined my own 80/20 plan and indeed put it into practice.

My business is mainly in developing niche sites that are run using WordPress. I write content that targets very high paying keywords in Google AdWords. My content indeed is very well written, unique, useful, entertaining and informative. The goal in mind though is to monetize it using Google AdSense. Some content I write that targets certain keyword phrases need a little more boost than others. Most of my content targets longtail keywords. However, some do not and need additional love.

The 80/20 plan that I follow is very simple. I invest 20% of my time writing content and 80% of my time marketing it. Depending on the strength of competition of the keyword phrases I am targeting will dictate the level of depth I go into marketing each article or page I create. For me, Internet marketing is a primary method of promoting my content on the Internet. It combines two elements: search engine marketing and social network marketing. (more…)

Today I want to talk to you about some reasons why your business needs a blog. You might not know what a blog is exactly and I will also cover that in this article as well. In order for your business to be successful you need to have it exposed to thousands of people. This as you know, is commonly called advertising. With advertising comes cost. As a business owner, I am sure that you have quickly discovered that it is in your best interest to find effective forms of advertising. All in all, you probably are open towards paying money for advertising; however, I am sure that you’d like to make sure that your money is well spent.

Let me introduce you to the world of blogging. Blogging is the single most cost effective form of advertising. You may be asking why and the reason is simple. Blogging cost virtually next to nothing and it has such a huge broadcast signal that can reach out to literally thousands of people in a single month. Real quick though, you may be wondering what a blog is, so let me explain that. (more…)

I have often speculated whether or not having your content submitted or bookmarked into social networks and bookmarking sites could improve your site SEO. I know for a fact that you can for sure increase traffic to the individual pages and sections of your site that have been submitted or bookmarked. However, in doing so, does it actually help your site become more search engine friendly?

It would be silly of me to claim that I am truly an SEO expert. I am honestly not. I have much more experience in search engine marketing rather than search engine optimization. For those who don’t know, indeed, there is a huge difference between the two. A search engine optimization expert is one who specializes totally in making a web site truly a search engine magnet. A search engine marketing expert, in my opinion, is an individual who specializes in writing content for the exclusive purpose of ranking well in the search engines for certain targeted keywords or phrases. (more…)