The Most Popular SEO Tools and How To Use Them
As the main objectives of online marketing campaigns are the improvement of the company’s page ranking to offer more visibility to the company’s products and services and attracting more visitors to the site with the aim of converting them in to paying customers, well-designed campaigns must make use of a number of different methods and target the same goal from many different angles.
The two basic categories of online advertising and search engine optimization are on-page and off-page SEO.
• On-page SEO means the creation and publishing of content on your own company website with SEO guidelines in mind, that is, the creation of a website the content of which is structured around the right keywords and is highly informative and useful.
• Off-page SEO is the sum of the techniques used for making the unique content of your website visible for internet users, by using media other than your own website. Your reputation as a trustworthy, helpful authority in your domain is promoted by the materials published on third party websites, while your web rank is improved by the links to your company website included into your materials.
In what follows, we would like to give a short overview of the most widespread methods used in successful internet marketing campaigns in an attempt to help internet marketers design their own marketing mix.
Article Marketing
Publishing articles for your website that provide information about your niche or help people interested in your area of activity to solve problems is one of the most popular tools used for off-page SEO. The popularity of the method is partly due to the fact that these short articles are relatively easy to create, due to the efficacy of the method and partly to its cost-efficient nature.
The articles are usually of 300-1000 words in length and they are organized around keywords considered to be the most relevant for your niche. The texts also contain an author’s box, which contains a short description of your company and the URL of your website. Your SEO article is then submitted to an article publisher, that is, a website that publishes texts about different informative topics. Article directory submissions have the double effect of establishing the author of the text as a helpful, well-informed and trustworthy expert in the niche and it also increases the page ranking the anchor text refers to by creating backlinks towards the site.
Forum Comments and Guest Blogging
These methods work in a way similar to article submissions, only this time the published content needs to be more concise and more direct. Forum posts and blog posts will also make reference to your company website, as most forums and blogs allow guests to create profiles on the blog or the forum and whenever you post a comment or an article, your profile details will appear next to your name. The role of these posts is essentially the same as in the case of articles: to create backlinks towards your site and to brand your name.
Press Releases
Press releases work like a subcategory of article marketing, only the possible topics to be tackled in your articles are much more restricted: press releases share information about product launches, about upcoming events your company is sponsoring or about other events that can possibly interest your audience. The tool is especially efficient if your company is engaged into sponsoring a branch of sports or participates as a sponsor of a cultural event, for example.
Social Bookmarking
This method implies the creation of your profile on social bookmarking sites and sharing your favorite URLs with other members of the bookmarking community. Sharing useful bookmarks and commenting on the bookmarks shared by other members will integrate you as an authority into the community you are targeting and it will also help with your link building efforts.
Video Sharing
Many experts say that one single picture can speak volumes and this is increasingly true for videos. More and more people are looking for information and entertainment on video sharing sites, and more and more companies discover the importance and efficiency of using sites like YouTube for SEO.
If you have an informative video material about how to solve a problem in your domain of activity, you can upload it on one of the video sharing sites and get the same double benefits as with the other tools: reputation and higher website ranking by increasing the number of your backlinks.
As you see, there are numerous methods you can include into your online marketing campaign. To avoid getting lost among publisher sites and types of content, you can ask for help from an SEO submission service – the experts working at the company of your choice will surely know where to start and how to build up the most efficient online marketing campaign for you.
