Last week one of my colleagues posted an article to BFM’s Business Learning Center entitled “How To Write a Blog That Drives Traffic to Your Website and Revenue to Your Business“. The article is a fantastic guide to creating a great blog for you business. If you still aren’t convinced that your company needs a blog, here are some numbers that should help you make up your mind.

An analysis of 1,531 web-marketing clients showed a huge difference between those who blog and those who do not. Here is the key info:

• 55% More Visitors for Companies That Blog (a measurement of the number of people that visit any page of a company’s site)
• 97% More Inbound Links (other sites linking to any page of a company’s site)
• 434% More Indexed Pages (how many of a company’s pages can be found on Google/Yahoo!/Bing)

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(photo source: Nima Badiey)

Mistakes are bound to happen! We all make them – but in life we try to avoid them. Sigmund Freud was once quoted:

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.”

But when businesses are hard-pressed for time and money, mistakes are not an option. Even if you are a Fortune 50 company, you may be in greater danger to succumbing to SEO ignorance. Upper-level management may not understand what it is or why it’s even important. Here are five common mistakes to avoid at all costs:

1. Self-centered Marketing

Just because a landing page looks nice and has a lot of content doesn’t mean that it has any relevance. If your homepage is full of your “company”, chances are that relevance for your consumers as well as search engines is lost. Many companies make the mistake of adding too much of themselves on a landing page, without explaining to the user what they do, and how that will help the user. Make content relevant and straight-forward.
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New York clothing store, RAG New York’s traffic from search engines continues to rise, months after search engine optimization by Blue Fountain Media was performed on the site from April to September 2008.

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By building an integrated campaign that takes advantage of both

Many of our customers have learned to rely on the steady traffic growth our high-ROI SEO can bring. Others are interested in using social media marketing to increase brand awareness and really get in touch with their customers. At Blue Fountain Media, we don’t just offer best-of-breed SEO and SMM solutions — we design our campaigns to take advantage of how both kinds of marketing can work together.
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R.A.G. website has record-breaking month thanks to our SEO work

New York clothing store, R.A.G. New York continues to see record traffic and sales on their website thanks to the search engine optimization performed by Blue Fountain Media between April and September 2008.  Our client was even mentioned in the NY Daily News thanks to our work.

See Blue Fountain Media in the NY Daily News

Currently, the website is not running any type of marketing program except through its 6 stores in New York City. The month of April broke all preceding records as can be seen in the two line graphs showing total visits and sales to the website since March 2008:

These results are both due to our re-design of the website as well as an extensive search engine optimization campaign which included months of link building, analysis, and a results-oriented team of dedicated individuals.
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Because they work best together.

Good marketing brings in qualified traffic; good design turns visitors into customers. If you can improve both at once, the benefits compound.

The combination of traffic and a good conversion rate can be very powerful.

When we build sites, we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view. And while our customers value good-looking sites, they’re making an extra investment in order to get a site that brings in more revenue. We’re always able to redesign a site so it gets more revenue per visitor — but what about bringing in more visitors?
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Now that we are officially in a recession (and have been for over a year), it is time to start spending money wisely. The oversized marketing budgets of the past are set to be replaced by smarter investments like search engine optimization of websites coupled with social media marketing.

Here a few reasons why it makes sense to invest in your website right now:

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Thanks to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry software, there has been an exponential explosion of smartphones hitting the market; the average consumer is presented with at least 20 different and competitive choices when shopping for a PDA or smartphone. 

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Your domain name says a lot about what users should expect to see before they click on a search engine results, follow a link, or enter-in your url. You must be sure that your domain name suits your business and the expectations of your target audience. Remember to not limit yourself when picking your domain name. If you are selling one product one day and selling ten others a few years later, your domain name should be able to stay relevant.

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Did you notice anything different about the above business information? It may look like your usual company details, but it is enhanced by a mark-up standard known as the hCard, one of many “microformat” standards that are available for use on your website.

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