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THE PERFECT SEO BLOG RECIPE

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Blogging is an art, just as writing can be a form of art. For the last decade plus, blogging has slowly taken an upward transition to paving the way as a medium that is both interactive, informative and SEO friendly. However, just like writing is an acquired skill, blogging is a form of writing that targets a specific audience to engage them in an online source which is well written and insightful. There are various ways to grow a following on the internet, blogging being one of those ways; however, many may wonder in which ways one makes a blog to be as successful and well read that it can be.
1.       Content vs. Frequency
When creating a blog, especially in the initial stages, frequency is extremely vital. Not only does it show your reader that you are committed to updating your site, but it acts as a way to develop a following on the internet. It allows Google to crawl your website regularly to improve your SEO properly. Whether you are annoying your readers by posting and updating on a daily basis or whether you are updating once a month, frequency plays a crucial role in the number of readers your blog will encounter. However, this being said, rich content is of even more importance. For instance, having a friend on Facebook who updates their status multiple times a day stating exactly what they are doing such as “making a sandwich” or “doing laundry” is annoying and can even cause you to unfriend that person. However, say you like a news page on Facebook and they post the exact same number of times as your Facebook friend, but their updates are informative and interesting. The chance that you will unlike the news page because of their frequency is not as likely as the option of unfriending the annoying Facebook user who posts multiple pointless statuses. This shows the importance of content – your frequency can be often if your blog is informative and educational; this is solely because readers want to read what they find is most interesting. Content is central to having a solid base of followers who view your blog on a continuous basis. The content created on your blog will have a direct and powerful impact to your ongoing SEO efforts. Update regularly, but have quality content, content that will drive your reader to want and to need more. Content that you can link within your website will add SEO value as well.
2.       Original vs. Generic
How often do you see news channels retelling the same news stories over and over again, and then see a different channel retelling what you just heard on the previous station? To be original is to be unique and different, and as it was once stated by Coco Channel, “In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.” You want your blog to be irreplaceable, you want it to be so that when a reader chooses whose blog they should visit first to be most informed, it should be none other than the one you have created.  Nevertheless, to be irreplaceable is to be different, and to be different means that one must take the initiative to dig deep for things that others may not see as important. It is your job to make the interesting important, and the important interesting. Original pieces of art attract attention, just as original and unique writing attracts a reader to want to know and read more. A generic blog post about the new iPhone 7 is not as interesting as the latest malfunction that has been found within the Galaxy 7. Don’t be generic writer, but rather, be a unique writer and write to entertain, write to capture your audience.  Following headlines is boring, every other person has done that, instead, take a unique angle on an already popular story and give it a twist.
3.       Blog Struggle vs. Blog Triumph
Blogging is a form of writing, and as any writer will know, “writers block” is a troubling and sometimes stressful form of block that can detour a writer from their ultimate vision. As a blogger, you know where you want to see your blog and how you want it to develop over time, however, “bloggers block” can sometimes distract you from your goals. The easiest way to deal with this is to continuously be watchful of what around you can be used within your blog. Whether it is a quote you recently heard or even the phone conversation the man next to you is having, if it can correlate into your blog, write it down. Once something is written down, you then have the ability to expand on that and to take the small piece of information and transform it into any direction you want it to go. Use the note pad function in your phone or carry a pad and pen on you at all times, write your thoughts and your ideas when they come to you on paper.
Creating a blog takes time and diligence, but if done correctly, you will quickly reap the rewards. By targeting the needs of your specific audience, creating quality blogs, and updating them to suit your readers, you will have a blog that catches eyes and dominates the search engines.

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Have A Great Holiday Season

It’s been a great year! Internet marketing is such a joy for us.

We’ll be working hard, but everyone at Logical Mix wishes you all a great holiday season.

Happy Holidays.

 

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ALT or Ault? Alt Attributes Are As Important As Doug Ault

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If you follow @logicalmix on Twitter, you already know Logical Mix is a big fan of the Toronto Blue Jays. There was no way to avoid the SEO pun that is alt…Doug Ault.

Doug Ault hit the first home run in Toronto Blue Jays history way back in 1977, but I bet you couldn’t pick him out of this grainy 1978 team photo. Frustrating right? Think of an individual with low vision on a daily basis having to deal without being able to see the image being shown. You can hit the first SEO home run for your company and be seen (unlike Blue Jays in the team photo), by providing incredible accessibility for those with visual disadvantages at the same time.

ALT image text or ALT tags or more accurately: alt attributes allow those with a visual impairment to understand an image.

Joost de Valk is the founder and CEO of Yoast and says, “the alt tag is used by screen readers, the browsers used by blind and visually impaired people, to tell them what is on the image. The title attribute is shown as a tooltip when you hover over the element…”

Always remember, screen readers will be used for your website. Build your website to accommodate the blind. This is a win-win for all parties involved.

The beauty of helping create a more accessible website for people with blindness or low vision is getting the benefits of search engine optimization as well. As time goes on, it will become more common practice to properly label images (as it should be already).

Be a responsible web developer and design your websites with proper alt attributes. All you ever have to remember to say to yourself when publishing an image, “if I was blind, how would I want that image to read?”

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SOME TAGS NEEDED FOR SEO

On-Page search engine optimization (SEO) is certainly an important part of the website building process. If you want to show up on the first page of any search engine’s search results, on-page SEO is a must. Logical Mix outlines the 3 most crucial elements needed to improve your on-page search engine optimization.
1) Title Tags: Can also be called ‘title elements’. The title tag is the text used to define an online document or the website page. Other than the relevant content on a web page, the title tag is the most important component to on-page search engine optimization.
2) Meta Description Tags: This is where your description is shown when getting search engine results. Your website’s content will be described exactly how you want the reader to interpret it on the search engine results page of Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. This is created on the back-end of your website using the HTML tags properly. Ask your developer to code this accurately to your specifications.
3) Alt Image Tags:  Alt Image Tags allow search engines to understand the attributes of an image by describing them in text form. Search engine robots/spiders have a hard time crawling images for SEO purposes without text on them. Another advantage to Alt Image Tags is if the picture doesn’t load on a website, at least there will be a description of what image should be shown. Again, these tags should be applied by whoever is building your website (whether it is you or a developer).
Two extra things to mention are using ‘Header Tags’ (accurate descriptions to summarize the content on a web page) properly and applying proper ‘descriptions/ file names to the images’ you will be displaying on your website. For example, PICTURE-DESCRIPTION.jpeg or PICTURE-DESCRIPTION.gif.
We hope this helps with your internet marketing efforts now and in the future.
Please write us or post if you want to discuss more.
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Blog About Needed Content

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When blogging, you want to be the expert in your field. Own it!

Create content people are looking for or have a need for. If you are missing quality content to write about…avoid writing altogether and repost other peoples interesting articles.

Try searching your topics before writing. If they are already saturated with blogs, maybe rethink another strategy.

People want to be entertained and/or educated. Sometimes both. Get outside of the box if you have to.

Even though we should be taking our own advice. Blog on a schedule. Once per week, bi-weekly, per month, etc.

Write about relevant content.

Blogging can be done anywhere you want. This blog was written in the woods after working remotely around Ontario.

Remember…

Be the expert in your field!

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Pay-Per-Click Advertising

So you want the most for your business, you want it to be seen, heard, and advertised to its best capability. While competition stands at the edge with the latest and greatest technologies, you want your business to draw the public in, and for the words on your site to be read. How does one improve their internet publicity in the best possible way? While there are various ways of doing so, managing your keywords is among the most important. Keywords are the crucial words that describe what you are offering and help determine where your ad will appear.

Choosing the most accurate keyword can help draw customers to your site as it targets exactly what they want. If you use specific keywords, and they search for a specific text, your advertisement or website has a better chance of appearing; by making it more specific, you are making it more viewable to the public and potential customers.  It is vital to think like your customers when you’re creating an initial list of terms or phrases that customers will use to describe your product or service. It is critical that the list of keywords you choose are the words that your customers will be searching when they want to find what you are offering. While it is important to make your words specific, it is helpful to bear in mind that sometimes making words too specific can be negatively impacting rather than positive. By making your keywords too specific you may find it harder to reach a vast amount of people. However, by combining general words along with specific phrases, you will be able to target the largest amount of people in an online community. Picking the accurate number of keywords is also crucial to achieving the highest amount of publicity. Google Support states that, “Most advertisers find it useful to have somewhere between five and twenty keywords per ad group, although you can have more than twenty keywords in an ad group”. In addition, grouping your keywords into themes can positively affect a customer’s search as it opens variety, which can therefore open your service or product up to potential customers.
While improving keywords is a vital part to having a successful online identity, creating better landing pages can also aid to improving search optimization. Your Google Adwords Quality Score is an estimate of how relative your ads and keywords are in helping Google users find what they are looking for and seeing your ad. Achieving a high quality score is the overall intention of any company as they want keywords that are helpful and useful to someone viewing their ad. Your landing page is the page your website visitors first view after clicking on a link that directs them to your landing page. In order to improve the performance of your search results, there are a few techniques that can be used to improve your page rank and quality score. By adding your top performing keywords and merging them together onto your landing page you can increase your search optimization and thus improve your Google quality score. In addition, by changing you landing page’s meta tags and title tags you can create a keyword density that works well with your landing page, as well as it acting as an aid in producing better search engine results.

Finally, a vital step is taking full advantage of what Google calls their Site-Related Keywords Tool. This tool is used to view how exactly Google ranks your landing page in regards to the relevance it has to the keywords you are trying to target. By using this tool, you can better understand how Google distinguishes between a website whose keywords work well for their landing pages, and a website that has poor keywords that do not directly target their associated landing page. By accurately using keywords that help to best optimize search engine results, you can get the most out of using online resources as a way to advertise for your company. Online sources are one of the most effective ways to advertise, and by using them accurately you can create an online profile for your company that aids in the development of your overall client base.

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NEW YEAR’S EVALUATION

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Another new year is upon us. It’s the perfect time of year to reevaluate your company’s goals and marketing efforts. You should be looking introspectively at your company’s results through marketing and make changes accordingly.

Questions to ask yourself:
1) Are we meeting or have we met the sales goal we set at the beginning of the year?
2) Are we on the first page on major search engines (For keywords & key phrases relevant to our business)?
3) How can we improve our overall exposure to potential clients or prospects?

The Answers:
1) If you said “yes” to meeting your goals, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t mess up a good thing. You may want to add to your current efforts, but certainly don’t let them interfere with what is working.
If your answer was “no”, you need to ramp up your activity to drive new business for your organization. Let’s assume you’re happy with your sales staff (if not, it’s time to increase training or let them go), here are some tips to help increase sales:
Do a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign: Drive traffic to your website. Create landing pages to aid in improving search optimization and watch the leads role in for your sales team.
Create a New Website or edit old Website: Make sure it looks professional and has the right “call to action”.
Search Engine Optimize: More on this in the 2) section. Create an Email Campaign or Direct Mail campaign: These are older methods to drive leads for your business, but can sometimes work wonders.

2) With regards to getting your company’s website on the first page of Google, Bing and/or Yahoo, write down a list of 10 key words or key phrases you want your company to show up for. Think like your prospects would think for this list. Write down a list of 10 (or the relevant number) geographic locations you want to be found in, if applicable. Take those lists to an internet marketing expert who can get you to the top of those pages desired (wink, wink, Logical Mix). Items to make sure are accurate on your website are: Title Tags, Alt Image Tags, Relevant Text and the Meta Description to name a few.

3) In the case of not seeming redundant, do all of the the above and you will be well on your way to improving your overall exposure to potential clients or prospects. Take it seriously, your business depends on it.

Enjoy the holiday season, recharge the batteries and always be thinking of strategies to grow your company (because, we are).

Wishing your organization a prosperous 2015!

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Smart Phone Compatible Website

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With the amount of smartphones being used these days, your business website better be compatible with smartphones or else you’re losing out. Google claims there are over 500,000 Android phones being activated on a daily basis.

The problem with websites that are not formatted for mobile phones are the usability factor and graphics. They are not what will keep a potential customer on your website. The graphics may be too large to fit on a smaller screen and will cause a person visiting your website to quickly become frustrated, and quickly leave your website. A website not properly formatted for smartphone use will be hard to navigate as well. The amount of traffic being generated via smartphones makes it worth the premium to have your website mobile compatible. Too many companies don’t value mobile compatible websites and it’s the perfect time to propel yourself above the competition, while they’re sleeping on a vastly growing technology. Because they will eventually understand the power of the smartphone.

According to Forbes, global mobile traffic now represents around 13% of internet traffic and in 2009 global traffic was only 1%. Those figures are most likely higher in North America too. If this doesn’t wake you up and let you know where the internet traffic is trending towards…nothing will. Be smart about your marketing your business and create a website that is both beautiful and user friendly on a smartphone.

Another statistic according to Forbes is that there are 1 billion  smartphone users in the world today. If only 0.1% of these users go to your smartphone compatible website, you will most likely be a very happy company. Thinking about catering to the smartphone market helps increase your positive internet exposure as well and you always want positive internet exposure.

If you think you can escape going mobile with your company, to quote Donald Byrd “you better think twice”.

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The New Logical Mix Website Is Here

Launching our new website is one of the most gratifying experiences our company gets to have. The emotional lift and moral boost your team gets after a new website launch is second to none in the business world. We are witnessing first hand what we pass on to your organizations and it truly makes us proud.
New elements had to be added to the new Logical Mix website to give it that updated look. We know our websites should be updated every 3-5 years (3 years really), so the change was needed now, because our 3 year mark is celebrated this month. We added a fully graphic and animated home page (with no adobe Flash elements). We made all of our pages a little more active. The last website was almost too clean. At the time it was perfect and refreshing, but times change and technology changes. From an internet marketing standpoint, our new website is a superior one. Having live blog and Twitter feeds on every page was important to us as well. A favourite change of ours was the Header and Menu bar. The top bar is one and now slightly shrinks, yet stays at the top of every page while scrolling. Very innovative.  It is such a sleek design with many beautiful elements that make it work. Everything was incorporated into this website design and we truly hope you enjoy it.
We have a new blog format as well. Every month we will release a blog. Sometimes this blog will update you on technology or give you internet marketing tips or update you on what’s going on in the “Logical Mix” World or be written strictly for fun while teaching a lesson, but rest assured you will always be entertained.
Our way of doing business is to always be out there creating positive internet exposure for you and you organization and our organization. By creating our new website we are following suit with our promise. All testimonials on our website are done in an extremely classy manner.
Your next website can incorporate any elements you see on our new website. We are never opposed to sharing.
Enjoy the rest of your 2014!
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Why Use Video For Your Website?

Videos, or visual animations, are not something we see in large movie arenas, but can be used to gain attention from consumers for your company’s own benefit. If the object of your company is to attract your customers to aid in the growth of your business overall, contemplating various marketing strategies is essential to understanding what works best for both your company and your customers. In May’s article, it was discussed the disadvantages of using Adobe Flash Player on your company’s website, in June’s article we will be addressing the positive advantages video and visual images has on your core audience. Marketing strategies both develop and create growth for your company, and by looking at each months article, and taking what is discussed into consideration, your company can profit greatly from these articles alone. It is commonly known that there are three different types of learners, visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic – while each prefers to learn in a different style, they have one mutual trait in common: they want to learn. Most consumers want to know what they are buying before they purchase an item or use a service, so it is the company’s main duty to inform them and teach them what it is you are offering and how it can benefit them. Different types of learners may view your website to attain information, but they all might not learn in the same way; some may prefer to learn through visual means, some by listening, and others prefer to do what they see and learn through using the tools they are given. By addressing all three different types of learners, your company is ensuring that not a single consumer will visit your website and quickly exit because they are overwhelmed by the content and it does not suit their style of interpreting information. By using videos within your website your company is directly speaking to both auditory and visual learners, 75% of the world’s population (from 40 to 65 percent of the population are visual learners, 30 to 40 percent are auditory learners). Now in terms of creating videos for your company’s social media realm, there are some important key points to keep in mind and remember. If your customers want to continue to watch the web videos you post on either your website or a video hosting site such as Youtube, you want to be consistent. If you want reoccurring viewers, you need reoccurring videos – set a date and a time that you will upload videos and make it public. It is in this way that you develop an audience who becomes both interested and devoted to what you are offering and it upholds a sense of accountability to your company and the videos that it creates. When deciding what sort of videos your company is going to create, it’s important to think about your audience and what they are interested in learning about. By doing this, not only are you putting their interests as first priority but your rate

of success will evidently increase as you are most concerned about their wants and needs, and as a result, you will hit the correct target audience. Hitting the right target audience – this may seem challenging and even daunting to some, it might even prevent a company from creating websites as they may be doubtful of whether or not they would be viewed or watched and it’s understandable to question how they are going to target the right viewers. The answer is simple, it’s something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – the process of improving the visibility of a website with key phrases or terms in a search engine. By thinking about what your customer would be searching and what words they would use to look for what you company offers, you will be able to greater target these viewers and have your videos be among the first to be listed when searched within the search engine. Your goal is to be a good keyword copywriter, you want to come up with words that will direct customers to your website and once there, they will be able to view your content and see what exactly you are offering. Another important fact that many often seem to disregard is the title and description of your videos; a title that has unnecessary words and is too long not only distracts the customer away from your web video but its complexity can even be overwhelming. You want a title that is both short and to the point, but is catchy enough to invite the customer into wanting to read what you are offering. Like the title, the description should be neither too long, nor too short, a sufficient amount of information to give them an overall impression of what your video is about and why they would want to watch it. Finally, to be linkable is extremely essential as it concludes the overall goal of your video – the customer finishes watching what you have offered, they want to know more about your services and where to go to learn more – this is the goal, this is the end product, and the importance of having more content and even contact information is necessary as you now have a customer who is interested and wanting to know more. By keeping these simple steps in mind when creating videos, you will find yourself with a higher audience and as a result a higher amount of customers – target the right people, consider their learning skills, and put your customers at the front of your mind, and your videos will be successful and well watched.

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