Although a Content Management System costs typically more to develop upfront, in the long run you save money on website maintenance costs.  You also save time waiting for your website developer to get around to making your changes – you can update your website whenever and wherever you want.

Do you need one?  It certainly isn’t a requirement, but I would highly recommend it.  You can use a content management system to add fresh content to your website on a regular basis. Adding quality content to your website is one of the best ways to improve your search engine rank.  The more pages you get listed in Google, the better chance you have in ranking higher for a wider set of keywords.  Fresh content also gets people coming back to your website more often and hopefully will link to your articles from their website or social media.  The more inbound links you get, the more important your site becomes in the “eyes” of Google.

With a CMS, you can easily add new pages to your website and the menu gets automatically updated.  A CMS usually has a blog feature as well, which is a popular means for adding content.  Just like Home Depot makes it easier for home owners to make home repairs themselves, a CMS makes it easier for businesses to update or add to their own websites.  Both allow you to DIY (do-it-yourself) without the need to hire an expert.  Save time, save money, and help your search engine rank.  What else could you ask for?

How well your web site performs in organic search results depends upon a lot of factors.  Organic search results are the non-paid listings in Google and other search engines.  Your Search Engine Optimization strategy must take into account many different things to rank well.  People often associate SEO with getting the right keywords on your web pages.  Although that is definitely a part of the story, there are many different aspects of SEO to think about.  If you have a large web site or you blog on a regular basis, your keywords will in effect take care of themselves.  Each one of your blog articles or web pages is typically written on a specific topic and the keywords will just come naturally… organically if you will.

When analyzing your SEO strategy you need to consider your web site copy, metadata, alt tags, inbound links, and so much more.  Questions you might ask yourself are:

• Is your web site getting enough traffic?
• Does your site have any SEO problems that might actually be hurting your organic search engine rank?
• How popular is your web site in the social media realm?

If you are curious as to how your web site is doing on all of these fronts, there is a great little tool called Website Grader that will analyze your site and grade it compared to hundreds of thousands of other web sites.  The report generated by this tool includes 5 sections:  Content, Optimization, Social Media Promotion,  Lead-to-Customer Conversion and Analysis.

Part I:  Content

This section looks for a blog – if you don’t have one, you’ll definitely lose points.  A blog is a great way to build your site content, adding more pages to the search engines and increasing your odds for being found organically.  If you have a blog, you will also be given a blog grade based on traffic levels plus the number and quality of links that point to it.  This section also looks to see how many pages you have indexed in Google and rates the reading level of your web site.

Part II:  Optimization

This section looks at your Search Engine Optimization, including your meta data, heading tags and alt tags.  It will take off points if you have any SEO problems but will also let you know specifically what the problems are so that you can correct them.  This section takes a look at your domain registration, including how long your domain has been registered and how much time until it expires.  Newer domains are penalized by the search engines (because so many come and go) and domains that are set to expire in less than a year are also penalized.  You can’t control the former, but you can definitely control the latter by renewing your domain for longer terms.

The Optimization section also looks at:

• Your inbound links which are vital to your organic rank.  Rule of thumb:  the more links you have, the more important you must be.
• Your MOZ rank which indicates your link authority or how popular your site is on a scale of 1-10.
• Your last Google crawl date — You want Google to crawl your site as often as possible to ensure that your latest content shows up in the search results.

Part III: Promotion

The Promotion section looks at your social media performance, including how many del.icio.us bookmarks you have and who’s talking about you on Google Buzz.  You will also receive a grade on your Twitter performance, based on your number of tweets and followers.

Part IV: Convert

The real value of your web site is to help you to convert leads into paying customers.  This section looks to see if you have an RSS feed and a conversion form.  A conversion form is just a fancy way of saying contact form – which is the primary way to get leads from your web site.

Part V: Analyze

The final section analyzes your web site’s traffic rank and overall performance.  You will be given a final “grade” and you can even post on your web site or facebook page a badge with your grade.  If you click on the badge above, you will see the report generated for WebImageDesigns.com.

The goal of your Inbound Link Building Strategy is to get other sites to link to your web site.  This requires some on-going effort on your part to request links from external sources.

Why do we need inbound links?  Because Google says so.  The search engines assume that the more links you have, the more important your website must be.

The #1 way to get more links is to write Great Content.  Think about it.  If your content stinks, who will want to link to it?  Although it takes some effort to write remarkable content, it is much more likely that people will share it in blogs, social media, etc.

Here are some other tips for getting inbound links and improving your search engine rank:

1. Make sure all of your pages are indexed in Google.  If not, then add them.
2. When you type in yourdomain.com does it automatically redirect to www.yourdomain.com?  If not, then you may be diluting your link authority by splitting your Google links between these two domains.  If you don’t explicitly tell Google that these 2 are the same website (by using a permanent redirect) then you are probably not getting credit for all of your inbound links. 
3. Is your website listed in The Open Directory Project?  Yahoo?  Bing? 
4. What about localized directories such as Google Maps and Yahoo Local? 
5. Do you belong to any organizations (such as the chamber of commerce) that might offer free links to their members? 
6. Are there any industry-specific directories that offer free or paid listings? 
7. Do you work with trusted partners whose businesses compliment yours?  Then create a partners page on your website and ask them to reciprocate by adding a link back to your website. 
8. Who is linking to your competition?  Why not ask them to link to you too? 
9. If you are using social media (and you should be), there are many opportunities to increase your links: 

• LinkedIn:  Add your website & blog to your profile
• Twitter:  Tweet your blog posts
• Facebook:  Link to your website from your Facebook page
• Social Bookmarking:  Bookmark links to your blog

 10.  Internal web site links are also important – make sure you add links from one page to another and use keywords in your link text!

Please share with us any creative ideas you have to help others build their link popularity in the comments below.

Related Articles:

1. Choosing the Right Keywords for SEO
2. Web Site SEO Part I:  I’ve chosen my keywords, now what?
3. Web Site SEO Part II:  Inbound Link Strategy

STOP RIGHT THERE!  Don’t dump that old website just yet!  Have you considered that your old website may have built up some credibility on Google and the other Search Engines?  That your current web pages may already rank well for some of your important keyword phrases?  Whether you worked hard on your Search Engine Optimization strategy or you got where you are by sheer luck, you don’t want to lose everything and start from scratch.  Do you?

Of course not!  So you need to have a web site redesign strategy in place before you upgrade to that new site.

Website Redesign Strategy 

1. Install Analytics on your current web site.  If you are not already running Google Analytics or some other analytics program on your website, you need to set this up ASAP. 
2. Review Analytics – You need to analyze the statistics on your current website.  What are your most visited pages?  What keywords are being used to find those pages?  This is very valuable information!
3. Keep well performing pages intact – Determine which pages are performing well and bringing a lot of traffic to your site.  You want to be very careful not to make any drastic changes to the content on these pages because it might have an adverse affect on your SEO.
4. Create Permanent Redirects – There is a good chance that your new web pages will have new names, especially if you are moving to a Content Management System.  You need to set up 301-Permanent Redirects to alert the search engines that your pages have moved and that anyone looking for your old pages should automatically be redirected to your new pages.  The benefits here are 2-fold:
   1. Visitors to your site will not get frustrated with page not found errors and leave your site to go to a competitor’s website
   2. Your pages will retain their SEO page rank. Page rank from the old pages is transferred to the new ones.

So by all means, upgrade the look & feel of your website – but not at the expense of losing your page rank & SEO standings.

I just finished reading the new book by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah entitled, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs.

Halligan and Shah are the founders of Hubspot.  If you are a Hubspot client, this book will reinforce a lot of concepts used by the Hubspot Methodology.  If you are not a Hubspot customer, here is your chance to learn the secrets behind Hubspot’s success.

This step-by-step guide to Inbound Marketing is broken into 4 parts:

Part 1:  Inbound Marketing

This section of the book explains why traditional marketing is broken and how the rules have changed.  I found the concept of your website as a central “hub” with outside forces driving people to your site an interesting analogy, which also explains how they came up with the name Hubspot. 

Part 2:  Get Found by Prospects

The key is to create remarkable content – content that people want to read and share.  Remarkable content can be blog articles, white papers, videos, webinars, etc.  Shah and Halligan go into detail on how to optimize your content for the search engines, how to promote your content in the blogosphere and how to use social media to interact with current and potential customers.

Part 3:  Converting Customers

Once you’ve created content worth sharing, you need to create compelling calls-to-action that send visitors to a landing page, collect their contact information, and then nurture these leads with the hopes of turning them into paying customers.

Part 4: Make Better Decisions

Track your progress to see what’s working and what’s not. Watch your competition to see what you can learn from them.  Hire the right people.  These are some of the recommendations Shah and Halligan suggest to help you make better decisions

I enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it.  If you are a perpetual list maker like me, you will love the format of the book.  At the end of each chapter the authors provide you with a “to do” list which summarizes the key points in the chapter.  Of course, it is up to you to follow through and implement these recommendations.

On a final note, I would like to quote my favorite line from the book:

“Don’t Forget the Humans!”

As funny as it sounds, sometimes people can get so worked up about keywords and SEO that they forget to keep the copy, title and descriptions “human readable.”  As important as the search engines have become, ultimately it is the humans we are selling to.

Click here to order your copy of Inbound Marketing from Amazon today!

Social Media is here to stay and LinkedIn can be a very valuable business tool.  So don’t be an empty profiler.  If this describes you, then it’s time to join the rest of the business world & get on-board with LinkedIn. 

Your first step is to complete your profile.  Do this before you start to look for connections.  The more you put into your profile, the more likely some past connections are going to find you!

Dust off your resume and use it to fill out your current and past work positions.  You’ll be amazed at how many of your old colleagues are connected on LinkedIn and before you know it they will find you.  Same goes for your education.  List all of the schools you’ve attended and your old classmates will find you too.  This is why social media can be so addicting.  It’s fun to catch up with old friends and you’ll learn to make new friends too (sounds like the advice your mom gave you on the first day of school!)

When you write a summary describing your current position and specialties, make sure you include keyword phrases (think SEO) because not only will people be searching within LinkedIn, but your profile will eventually make it into Google too!

Once your profile is about 80%-90% complete, you can start searching for connections and groups – after all it’s the “social” part that makes it fun.  But don’t forget about completing your profile. 

Aim For 100% Completion!

The trick to getting to 100% is giving and receiving recommendations.  You need to write recommendations for others and ask them to do the same for you.  It feels good to say nice things about others and you’ll feel pretty special if someone says great things about you too.

Where do you start?  First make a list of all the phrases you think people are searching for.  If you are running any analytics on your website, take a look at the reports and see what keywords real customers have already used to find you in the search engines – some of these may surprise you.  If these are not already on your list, add them.

Armed with your list of keywords, it’s now time to use some tools to analyze your list.  Google Adwords (Google’s Pay Per Click Advertising Program) offers a free keyword tool to help you build your keyword list:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Enter in your keyword list with each keyword phase on a separate line.  Click “Get Keyword Ideas” and Google will generate a list of suggested keywords based upon traffic over the last month and over past 12 months.  Look for similar phrases and compare the traffic data.  For instance, if you are a Family Law Attorney you may be quite surprised to learn that many more people (55,000 more in May of 2009) are searching for Divorce Lawyer over Divorce Attorney in Google.  That’s a lot of additional searches in a single month so you may want to revise your copy and keyword strategy to include this phrase.  Analyzing the results from Google Adwords and other keyword tools may open your eyes to some additional keywords that you may not have thought about before.  Remember, you want to focus on what your customers are searching on and not what you would search on.

WordTracker also offers a free keyword tool (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/) but I don’t find this as helpful as the Adwords tool.  If you want to try WordTracker, I would recommend that you sign up for their free trial at http://www.wordtracker.com which is much more robust than their free keyword tool.

It is also important to see how many other websites are competing for your keyword phrases.  The free tools unfortunately don’t really give you much data in this area.  SemRush is an online tool dedicated to analyzing your competition.  WordTracker also includes statistics on how many site are competing for the same keywords.  Both offer free trials so that you can try before you buy.  You can also do some legwork on your own by typing your top keywords into Google and analyzing the websites of your top competitors.

One last thing that I’d like to mention is what the SEO world refers to as “long-tail keyword phrases.”  These are often hidden gems in the search engine treasure chest.  Long tail keywords are just longer phrases – 3 to 5 words long that are very, very specific to your product or service or even geographical location.  If someone types in a very long keyword phase, they are looking for something very specific and are ready to buy it now.  The great news is that there is typically less competition for these longer keyword phrases to being with, so your odds of being found are even higher.  So if you are a BMW dealer in Boston, you would be more likely to close the deal with someone who finds your website with a search for “BMW M3 Convertible Boston” than you would for “Boston Car Dealership.”

If you have additional ideas for how to choose the right keyword phrases, please share your ideas with us by adding a comment below.

• I don’t have time to blog
• I don’t know what to blog about
• I’m not interesting enough
• Who would read my blog?
• The dog ate my blog

I’m sure there are many people out there who feel the same way.

So why the change or heart?  Well, I’ve finally realized that…

BLOGGING IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS!

Blogging is good for business on so many levels.  Writing a blog about your industry can help to establish you as an industry expert, which in turn can lead to more business.

Blogging is a great way to get feedback from your customers.  It allows them to start a conversation with you by leaving comments on your blog.  Make sure you reply to their comments, engage them in a dialog and find out as much as you can from them!  This is a unique opportunity for you to get to know your customers better.

Blogging is also key to improving your search engine rank.  Adding new content on a regular basis keeps your website fresh.   Updated content keeps potential customers, as well as the search engine robots, coming back for more!  And the more website content you have indexed in Google the better, because it increases your chances to rank higher for a wider set of keywords.

So stop making excuses!  Remember, “Content is King,” and blogging is one of the best ways to reach the “Royal Ranks.”

Please add a comment below and let us know why you like to blog and how it has helped your business.