June 9th, 2016
There are approximately 4.49 billion webpages in the world today -- how will yours get noticed? Check out these tips for how to think about your marketing strategy:
Shrek once famously told Donkey that ogres are like onions -- many layers. While his analogy worked, we're going to use Donkey's suggestion that ogres -- and SEO strategies -- are like cake. That is to say, they are multi-layered.
In the cake of your website, there are many components (cake layers) that make it attractive, usable, compatible, and, most importantly, search-friendly. So, imagine your layer cake -- the bottom level is the site infrastructure, the next is the actual platform/ CMS, the next is the info architectures, and the top layer, which is what everyone is actually looking at, is the content of your site. And what is that frosting, working so hard to keep all of those layers together and looking delicious? That's SEO.
Your "icing" is comprised of several different ingredients -- think links, paid search, keyword marketing, and social media. And, in the same way, that icing can be nauseating if it's too sugary, you can go very wrong with the way you execute your digital marketing strategy.
For instance, search engines, which you are trying so hard to get to notice and rank your site, don't appreciate keyword stuffing. This is a sure-fire indicator that there are shady tactics behind the content on a website. Purchased links might do the same thing and never undervalue a quality user interface. Google's spiders can do a lot of damage as they crawl all over your site, but the real dangers lie in potential customers passing you by because of too many ads or a confusing site layout.
Like a cake, it is also good to be as diverse and multi-flavored as possible -- consider an approach made up of several different components. Things like personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Some top-performing email campaigns earn one forward for every 21 emails opened.
Craft your SEO, knowing that it is what will hold all of the rest of your site/cake together, and make it rank as high as possible. That's one tasty website.