Web Design, Development & Online Marketing - Serving the Central and North Texas Markets

One of the most common mistakes we come across in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is that most sites contain only one sitemap. Your sitemap is used for search engines to identify pages across your site, which greatly enhances crawl rates and indexing of your website. The more pages you have indexed, the more likely your content is to be found in search engines. Thus why not use multiple site maps to separate out content on your site?

The Why

Now lots of people say "Oh well my site isn't large enough for multiple sitemaps." But doesn't your site have a blog? Might your blog need a separate sitemap? Or sitemap for a section of articles or resources?

One of the biggest reasons for separating these out, is so that you now exactly how many pages in each section of your site are indexed. It would of course be a lot easier if big'ol mean Google would just tell you within Webmaster Tools. But hey they're not. So it makes sense to break your site down into multiple sitemaps so you can easily see what on your website is indexing and what is not.

You can see above that by separating out the sitemaps that we know 98% of our blogs have been indexed by Google. If these weren't separated how we would know? How do you know if your blog is indexed?

The How

Creating Sitemaps is pretty easy, I recommend the XML sitemap generator over at www.xml-sitemaps.com. For simple sites I recommend at least separating out your blog separately from your main site. If you have a separate section for articles, I would do one for it as well.

For larger more complex sites, for instance an e-commerce site with hundreds of product pages, you might have a sitemap for each primary category and possibly subcategories. That's for you to decide.

The Results

With this practice, not only is it easier to analyze your websites indexing, but your website will more than likely have more indexed pages and index new pages faster.

The same holds true with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Toolbox. Each allows for submission of multiple sitemaps of your website. Note that Bing Toolbox is at least nice enough to actually show you the indexed pages in the Index > Index Explorer section, but don't expect them to automatically start indexing a separate Blog Sitemap. I recommend that you monitor this section and physically look to see what is being indexed. You can manually submit your URLs since they allow for 50 direct URL submissions a month or 10 per day.

So you have your eFusion blog setup and posted your first blog, but you think to yourself “Wow this looks a little boring”.  The best part about eFusion blogs (well any part of eFusion really) is that you can customize virtually anything you can think of.  This can be really useful when you need to highly customize something for search engine optimization. 

But to jazz up our blog, we thought we would introduce adding a picture, website, and phone number to each of our authors.  I think this greatly enhances the blog and adds a personal touch to the readers, and all with very minimal coding involved.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is login to the Admin section of your eFusion website (yourdomain.com/admin) and then go to ‘Admin > More Customization Options’ and then choose ‘Blog Layouts’

From here you can customize each type of blog layout that you have.  The one we are most concerned with is “Blog Post List Layout”.  This the overall layout of your blog, the view in which you have a list of ALL of your blog posts.  From here you will see the WYZYWYG with the generic blog information (Title, Author Name, Date, Post, etc.)

Step 2

The main thing we are trying to do is have eFusion load an image that is ‘dynamic’ so that it pulls the right picture for the right author.  Well since each author has their own name, that will be used as our unique identifier.  In screen shot you see that we already have a tag for {tag_blogpostauthor}.  This dynamically pulls the name for that author.  So it makes sense to reason that we can upload an image BlogAuthor.jpg and have their image be unique to each author.

Step 3

So we need to go in HTML view add the line of code:  <img alt="Blog Author" src="/images/authors/{tag_blogpostauthor}.jpg" />

Remember that your image path can be whatever you need it to be, as long as you use {tag_blogpostauthor}.jpg as the actual name of the image.   And of course you can style the image however you feel necessary. The best place to put this is just under:

<div class="post-details"> {tag_blogpostauthor} - {tag_blogpostdate} </div>

If you don’t have much coding experience, I suggest using something along these lines:

<div style="float: left; padding-right: 15px; padding-bottom: 10px; width: 148px;"><img alt="" src="/images/authors/{tag_blogpostauthor}.jpg" />

You will need to set your own padding or margins as you see fit as well as the width for the image.  Just remember you can always edit /StyleSheets/ModuleStyleSheets.css, if you need to change up how the default blog classes are handled.

While you’re in there feel free to add a phone number or anything else you’d like to use for your Blog Author mini profile.

P.S. You should definitely add a “Share this” widget to the end of each blog post.  So while your editing the Blog Post List Layout, copy and paste this at the end of your layout:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js"></script><a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php" class="addthis_button" addthis:url="http://wsiwebsmart.com{tag_permalinkonly}" addthis:title="{tag_blogposttitle_nolink}"><img height="16" width="125" style="border: 0pt none;" alt="Bookmark and Share" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" /></a>

Just make sure to change out wsiwebsmart.com do yourdomain.com

Enjoy!

1. Creating Your Own Videos

Professional Production vs. Do it Yourself Using a production company to create your video can be very expensive. In fact, a recent study by Visible Gains found that lower quality, authentic videos can generate a better response from users. Creating something that feels transparent and can appear more honest and calming than something done by a professional studio. However, this may not be the best alternative for every business. For those unfamiliar with technology, the idea of creating your own video may seem daunting. However, it’s not as challenging as you would think. Video cameras such as the Flip HD and Kodak ZI8 are two cameras that are extremely easy to use and affordable. Just point and shoot to begin creating your content, although you may want to prepare with a script.

Topics for Videos

Just like any other content you’ve produced, you’ve got to produce something that has inherent value to it. When creating a video, think of what your target customers would be interested in reading. Finding something to promote that is unique about your company and is a differentiator will better hold the attention of your users.

Click Here for our Video Marketing White Paper

2. Improving Website Conversion

One of the most advantageous ways to use video is increasing your website conversion rates.

Thirty-Second Intro

First impressions are crucial. Your ‘thirty-second pitch’ is an effective way to entice visitors to perform an action such as providing an email address, clicking through to the next page, or even making a purchase decision.

Video Testimonials

Nothing speaks to your business’ credibility and quality like testimonials from other satisfied customers ‐integrating video testimonies in places where an action is required. This may include forms or check out pages or even an up‐sell or cross‐sell in the checkout process.

3. Search Engines

How Do I Get Indexed?

One of the big problems with getting videos indexed is that search engine spiders cannot parse what’s being said within your videos. However, there are some important things you can do to make sure your videos are found by search engines and are being indexed appropriately:

Titles – Make sure your title is catchy. Consider if your title is interesting or if it may be viral. Include your keywords just as you would for web page optimization.

How Can I Rank?

Video content is a medium that often times earns many links and carries a considerable amount of link juice. Despite its authority over other media, expecting to rank for shorter competitive keywords still may be very difficult. Consider going after longer keywords (long tail keywords) for less competitive search engine results pages (SERP).

Allow Embedding ‐ Allowing people to embed your video will produce more links back to your Website, along with disseminating your content quickly and further than you would be able to do otherwise.

4. Marketing Your Videos

Email Marketing

Using video in your email marketing can have a dramatic effect on the way you spread your message to your prospects and clients. Engaging with video has been proven to extend the amount of time viewers spend reading your emails.

Blog

Using video in your blogs is fast becoming one of the most popular prefer video to text more often than not. Just be sure to keep (around two minutes) or you’ll begin to lose your audience.

For more ideas on Marketing your Videos Click Here

5. YouTube Channel Design

Youtube is the largest video network on the Internet. If you’re producing video it’s a good idea to be sure that you have your own YouTube channel. YouTube channels archive all of your videos for users to be able to watch. Additionally you can customize the look and feel of your channel to be unique and representative of your business.

For further reading on Video Marketing Click Here.

Still Overwhelmed with Video Marketing? Contact your WSI Consultant Patricia Jordan.

Not convinced that blogging should be mixed into your marketing mix?

The trend numbers speak for themselves and our customers have found quick benefits by applying strategic blogging.   So can you.

Let’s face it, you will have to do it for self preservation at some point anyway, so businesses should jump on board now rather than try to catch up later.

E-Marketer reports the steady growth in the chart below.

Content Marketing

The reason why blogging is important is because consumers going online are first looking to consume content, educate themselves about a topic of interest and then take action based on an informed decision.  Blogs are subject rich content.  They are especially helpful for marketers wanting to gain visibility for “long-tail” keywords.

How to plan your blog topics

Of course you can just blog away with no specific purpose.  Sometimes this can be effective in driving traffic as many relevant keywords come naturally in your text as you write about a subject you know well.   But, if your have a more purposeful marketing objective, strategizing and planning your blog topics and technically optimizing them with each post is much more powerful at getting results.

Ideas for planning your blog topics:

Get help from an Internet Consultant who can perform in depth keyword research which will reveal actual “units of demand” for keywords relevant to content you can supply.   So get blogging, because someone is wanting your knowledge and perspective.