Here is an interview I did recently with with Joe Balestrino of www.MR-SEO.com:
Kevin: How did you come up with MR-SEO.com?
Joe: I had just started my small business, focused on search engine optimization and knew I wanted to come up with a name that would be memorable and would help me brand my business. As a small web-based business, it is important to choose a name that has to do with your industry and will count in search terms. I liked MR-SEO.com but when I typed it into the search engines a bunch of guys were coming up that had nothing to do with my business. I knew I wanted that name and had to think of a way to capture people based on my spelling of MR-SEO. To make it happen I had to work constantly on getting other sites to link to me.
Kevin: Why is link-building so important?
Joe: Link-building tells search engines what other people think of your site or pages. If you can get other experts in your field to link to you, then that makes you an expert too. And in doing so, people linking to you will help brand your business. You can also use audio and video search engine optimization. The audio and video you create can help you get links which in turn help brand your business. That’s what I did with MR-SEO.com. I have specific episodes now linked directly to my site.
Kevin: How else can you leverage SEO to build your brand?
Joe: With Web 2.0, social networking, blogging, etc., if you create a popular post and people subscribe to your RSS feed, they will keep coming back to you and seeing your brand over and over.
Kevin: What about keyword optimization?
Joe: It’s all about finding key words that relate to your specific business and at the same time are highly searched on the search engines. If you are a hot dog manufacturer, for example, and come out with new hot dog… go to Trellian.com or Overture.com and search for “tasty hot dog†to see if they are hot keywords. You can use these tools to gauge how often certain terms are searched. You need to know what people are searching for if you are going to successfully attract them.
Kevin: Some people can get lucky and tap into a wealth of site visitors but most of us need to really work at getting a recurring audience. Right?
Joe: Well, first of all you shouldn’t just generate traffic for the sense of getting eyeballs. You need to get the specific traffic that makes the most sense for your business. If you get people to come to your site and don’t offer what they want, they’ll leave and never come back. You’re wasting your time, their time and potentially creating a negative effect on your brand. People optimize incorrectly all the time, throwing every keyword they can into their keyword tags, on every page, etc. It’s just not effective. You need to take the time to do research to determine what keywords make the most sense for your business. Go to Google and type in your keywords to see what comes up. If no one you compete with comes up, then there is probably a reason. If you choose the right words, often times your competitors are already there. That is why links are so important. They raise the importance of your site over theirs.
Kevin: Can you elaborate more on keyword optimization on specific pages to attract the search engines?
Joe: Every page is a separate doorway into your site. If you have multiple key words you want to use, don’t put them all on one page. Multiple pages on your site give you multiple opportunities to target specific audiences to different areas of your site. Don’t optimize one page for multiple terms, but rather optimize each page for a particular term or several if they are related.
You can visit Joe Balestrino’s site for more SEO insight and to have him help you optimize your site, and brand, at MR-SEO.com.
By Kevin B. Levi
www.winningmessage.com/services.html
www.powerproof.net
I had great results with SideKickRV.com after welcoming the company aboard as a client. Links to and from others’ sites, blogs such as this, myspace, facebook – all have become key avenues in driving traffic to one’s website.
SideKickRV.com used a little print to get its product in front of its market and a lot of shoe-string-budget time on the computer.
Great points Mr SEO!
Great interview Mr. SEO. You especially nailed it when you spoke about not getting eyeballs just for the sake of getting eyeballs.
There are too many SEO experts who overlook the impact of using a targeted SEO approach.
Launching a website requires that you find a way to get the eyeballs of those people who will actually vibe with what it is that you are putting out.
I see too much time, energy, effort, and money wasted on people chasing traffic just for the sake of having traffic.
Thank you Mr. SEO for your targeted-traffic perspective.
That was a great article. I have been missing some aspects on building my new site and the information I got really helped me fill in the holes. Thanks
Great article. Really enjoyed the interview. Some really good tips in there.
Very good article. I agree, SEO, social networking and linking are all important things for companies to focus on when working on their internet marketing.
Good solid advice, SEO in this day and age of the internet is becoming increasingly necessary, as an SEO myself for the past 8 years it`s great to come across blogs such as this that highlight the need for small and large business alike to take on board SEO, great article and thumbs up MR SEO
Great interview….Branding the business is done by means of SEO optimization…If there are multiple keywords, then you should to different pages rather than in one page…We need hard work to achieve this to get a branded name…Once it has been branded, it is mainly because the customer has given correct feedback….Nice interview about the business…Thanks for sharing!!!