Got a special service or demographic you want to target on your website? This happens frequently in business – a change in direction, a new partnership, even a special event you want your online visitors to focus on. Usually it’s something big enough to need more functionality than just a new page or posting, but not big enough to wipe out all of the SEO, design, content and other work you’ve done on your site by starting from scratch.

The answer to your quandary might be to build yourself a Microsite. A Microsite is a smaller, more simple website – a subset of your main website – that’s extremely focused for a specific reason. Usually Microsites are heavily optimized for a small set of specific keywords and phrases, are geo-targeted and meant for a particular demographic or to achieve a particular goal.

Think of Microsites as another channel in your digital marketing toolbox, somewhere between email marketing and SEO of your main site. Like email, a Microsite is targeted for a certain subset of your audience, complete with targeting and specific calls-to-action. And, like your main site, it’s a live website with a full complement of keywords and SEO, designed to attract a certain segment of online search for a specific purpose. (more…)

Make your content work for you over and over - re-imagine, don't just recycle. (Photo: apSos.de)

This past week, My good friend Ann Handley and I participated in a Webinar about re-imagining your content. The main takeaway:

Don’t just re-purpose your content. Look at it and figure out ways to present it to new audiences, in new formats and with differing end-goals. Re-imagine, don’t recycle.

In a nutshell:  Build out a plan – by quarter, by year, by season – with focus on each section on a single theme. Next, build one major piece around that theme that covers all you want visitors, customers and readers to take away from your business. You’re the expert, and here is where you prove it. It can be in the form of a seminar or presentation, a white paper or eBook, or some other weighty item – as long as it’s both focused on the current  theme, and complete enough that it covers many angles.

Next, use that larger piece to make smaller, bite-size, well-timed, targeted chunks that you can use to spread the word out over time, assert your industry expertise across a few different channels and keep interest in the theme high – all of which will consequently keep visitors coming to your site for more.

Sounds simple? In essence it is – but it’s hard work, as Ann and I discussed. (more…)

Identifying robots more effectively - even indirectly enlisting their help - will distill your results, and solidify your site's relevancy.

In a recent post, I spent some time exposing what we’ve since been calling the “bot quandary,” which, put simply, is the tendency for a sites’ analytics to become skewed – sometimes significantly – because indexing visits from bots and spiders are counted by search engines. In this post, I will spend some time on a few things that can be done to help reduce that skew in order to clarify your site’s actual relevancy.

Take aim and select your target, then execute

As I pointed out in my prior post, these spider visits affect site analytics, often significantly. In order to get a more accurate picture of your site’s true relevancy, it’s necessary to remove them from the count. But – and this is important – you don’t want to block the bots completely, or you’ll stop being indexed altogether. Of course, this can be a much worse fate than some fairly skewed numbers. (more…)

Separating the bot from the customer will refine your site's analytics - sometimes more than you'd think.

Two words you hear constantly in content discussions are relevance and traffic – testament that these concepts, maybe more than any others, drive the life of your site. Usually, but not always, the two form a symbiotic relationship: relevance definitely drives traffic – in many different ways – and usually our focus is on how to harness that power for good.

For this post, though, I want to focus on another, less obvious – and much less intuitive – relationship between content and traffic: the concept behind the relevance of traffic.

It’s not something web professionals have examined readily – or very heavily – as search has grown, but the concept is gaining steam around analytics and SEO discussions lately. (more…)

I monitor SEO for a lot of clients on a monthly basis. A lot of it appears to be redundant to them because there aren’t many changes, but all of it is relevant for a very important reason. If an update occurs on your site and something goes down behind the scene, you aren’t going to notice it unless you or someone else is monitoring you websites SEO on a monthly basis. This is a list of things that I recommend you or someone else should be monitoring for you so you can ensure that you site continues to rank well in the search engines.

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Sitelinks have been a staple within Google search results for years, and until this week, they have remained relatively unchanged.  However, Google recently launched a new form of sitelinks that give visitors a more detailed description of pages within a particular site.

With that formal introduction, I present to you, “The Bridgeline Sitelink 5 W Guide.”

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