by Mark Bloom | Mar 2, 2013 | Content Marketing
How to Get Ranked Higher for Search Results
This is the question on every business-owner’s mind. If a company has a website — and what serious company, no matter how small, doesn’t? — the visibility of that website becomes a major concern.
When a business thinks about ways to grow — ways to advertise its products or services, and ways to attract new customers — a new hot website seems like a no-brainer. It’s the old “If you build it, they will come” philosophy. In reality, however, the world doesn’t work that way.
So, after an initial push to launch the website, it just sits there. All optimism soon fades. The site is written off as a loss.
It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. Building the site is just the first step. There are ways to nudge the search page listing toward the top (aka, increasing the page rank of the website, getting more potential customers to look at your site, and then turning them into clients).
Build It the Right Way
We recently took a seminar put on by Chris Kaminski of Lone Bird Studio. He’s been in marketing for 30+ years and in the website end of it for 13+ years. He knows of what he speaks.
Chris ran through a litany of proper ways to build and code a website. Part of the trick is to develop and employ the right keywords, not only for your business, but for each page of the website. Everything has to be relevant, and every keyword has to match.
But That’s Not Enough
The really interesting thing about the seminar, however, was what Chris had to say about the key elements of the keyword use (and we’re paraphrasing here): “Stuffing keywords into text on the page no longer works. In fact, it may work against you. The copy has to flow naturally.”
To put that in layman’s terms, he said, “Search engines today are content-driven… It’s all about the quality of the content.”
What It’s About
This confirms what Ray Access has repeated here many times: the best way to raise your page rank is to provide quality content — useful and relevant information — to your website continually over time. It’s the best way to attract visitors, establish your authority, and yes, move your listing up on the search pages. Find out how Ray Access can help your website’s page rank.
Having your website rank higher based on the site’s content is not only the most effective way to do it, but it’s also the cheapest way to do it. There’s also a term for it: it’s called organic. Organic means that you’re putting the time into your website to add value. Search engines, regardless of the current algorithm for determining rank, will always be attracted to organic value. Or as Chris put it: “Organic buzz rarely comes without quality content.”
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Elle Ray | Feb 13, 2013 | Editing
Editing Your Content and What It Means to You
What does it mean to edit a piece of writing? Let’s look at an example.
Joanne is a small business owner. Her business is called Bits & Pieces. She sells automobile accessories, everything from steering wheel covers to custom hubcaps. She’s excited about her growing business and has just launched a new website.
While she has employees to do the nuts and bolts work of finding or making items and then selling them, she’s been reluctant to hire someone solely for the purpose of marketing. So she hired a friend to build the website and wrote all the text herself, often staying up late at night to finish.
So she’s appalled, when browsing the new site, to see on the About page that she’s misspelled her company name. Worst than that, she used a “T” instead of a “B.” As she hurriedly places a call to her friend for a quick fix, she wonders what other errors are lurking on the site and what kinds of backlash they may cause.
How Editing Can Help
At its most basic, editing is simply getting another set of eyes to look over any writing before it’s published — online or in hard copy. Mistakes like the one described above are caught before they become a nuisance… or an embarrassment.
Effective editing goes beyond simple proofreading, as it well should. Editors fix grammatical and spelling mistakes, true, but they also make writing stronger, clearer, and shorter, which is most important to your online audience.
A good editor rearranges the thoughts on the page to make your case more persuasive. A good editor finds the perfect word or phrase to replace ho-hum writing. A good editor makes your prose come to life.
Ray Access Does the Hard Part
Too often, in our vast experience, we’ve seen business owners get discouraged by the writing process and stop blogging. This is a missed opportunity. A regular blogging practice on your company website can attract an audience, get your company noticed, drive up the website’s page rank, and establish you as an authority in your field.
But business owners aren’t necessarily writers. It may not be where your passion lies. But it is exactly where our passion lies. Let Ray Access tackle the blogging for you. Your company will still reap the benefits, and you’ll have more time to devote to the things you do best.
Ray Access has helped many companies increase their bottom lines. Our rates are surprisingly affordable, and you’ll start to see results in the first year. Don’t miss an opportunity to grow your business online.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | Feb 7, 2013 | Website Content
Your Website Content Will Reign During 2013
Most of you know that we’ve repeated our belief that content is king to our friends, our business associates, and of course, our clients. In fact, we’ll tell anyone, including you.
The best way to gain exposure on the Internet is to provide good, informative content on your website, delivered consistently over time. Good quality content is the absolute best way to reach your marketing goals and to establish your company as an authority in your field.
You may think we say this because we’re Ray Access and we’re in the business of providing content, but you’d be wrong. We say it because it’s true, and we’re not the only ones to assert it. We follow the trends of the online marketing industry, and we’ve found marketing experts, trendsetters, and bloggers who agree with us.
While we’re not privy to whatever Google or Bing has in store for the future of search engines, we believe sincerely that good writing and useful information will win in the end.
Keywords will always have value and backlinks work for now, but search engines keep refining their criteria. It always comes back to quality content, delivered consistently. Now others are confirming what we already knew. eMarketer.com recently wrote that content is the number 1 marketing priority for 2013, overtaking the focus on social media.
Getting on social media has been an industry mantra for the past several years, but eMarketer.com stated that “companies understand social media’s potential value in engaging customers and generating leads, but are having trouble developing effective methods of measuring return on investment.”
In other words, an actual visit to your website has value; a “like” really doesn’t. And even when you do develop a healthy social media presence, what are you going to give your followers? You’ve got to give them reasons — new reasons every day — to keep coming back for a visit. It’s your content that not only lures them in the first place, but keeps them coming back until you become a household word.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
