Increase Traffic to Your Jewelry Website | Blogging for Customers

What Every Jeweler Should Know About Blogging
by Rachael Dror 630-269-3725

BLOG is a four letter word
Don't let the word BLOG scare you. There are many misconceptions about blogging. Blogging for business is not about sharing what you had for lunch or writing about the scandals of Hollywood types. A blog isn't a free for all where anyone can comment. Business blogging is about establishing yourself as the expert, taking control of your marketing message and online reputation, generating updated content preferred by search engines and above all creating appealing content that speaks to your target market. Blogging will help to drive traffic to your jewelry website, increase your search rankings and much more.

So You Want to Blog?
You have many options to choose from when it comes to setting up your jewelry blog. You can use Blogger for free. If you don't have a gmail account you'll need to set one up to use Blogger. My favorite blogging system is WordPress. WordPress is highly optimized for search engine rankings and is easy to use. You can implement a WordPress blog on a subdomain of your existing site or you can designate an url for a stand alone solution. A WordPress blog can be a replacement for an existing static website.

Blogging for Search Rankings
One major benefit to blogging is increased visibility in the organic search results. The job of the search engines is to return the most relevant results for a given search query. Since 85% of search engine users never click on paid ads, that means that you want your site to come up in the organic results. To do this without paying for adwords, your site must be determined by the search engines to be relevant and a source of good information. There are many factors that search engines take into consideration when determining the value and ranking of a site.

Below are some of the most important factors:
1. how often a website is updated
2. the age of the website
3. keyword density and placement
4. incoming links

Search engines like blogs because they are constantly updated and highly optimized with tags and keywords.

If you are commitment phobic then blogging may not be your thing
Blogging doesn't have to be stressful or time consuming but it does take the right strategy and dedication. A blog should...
1. provide potential customers with information, education or entertainment of interest to them
2. contain target keywords for search rankings
3. establish the Jeweler as the expert
4. be updated on a weekly basis if not daily

*More to come on the topic of blogging for Jewelers!

Internet Marketing for Jewelers | Link Building Explained

Optimize Your Jewelry Store's Website with Link Building |
by Rachael Dror

Incoming links are those that come from an external website to yours. Google places great value on the number and quality of links coming in to a website. Incoming links tell Google that your website has good information and that you are the expert.

Link building or off-page optimization is the core discipline of Search Engine Marketing. It requires both marketing and technical expertise, and the right combination at the right time. Linking must be implemented methodically and over time. An overly aggressive linking strategy may in fact have a negative impact on a site’s rankings. Off page optimization refers to a group of multi-dimensional strategies and tactics for marketing a website with the primary purposes of brand promotion and brand protection. The ultimate goals of any SEO initiative include:

• Increasing a website’s visibility online
• Increasing search engine rankings for targeted relevant keywords
• Increasing website traffic
• Increasing sales leads for a business
• Identifying effective keywords
• Evaluating competitors

Achieving natural rankings through linking is not an ‘event’, it is a ‘process’ requiring patience, commitment to the endeavor and tempered expectations. Why? To insure the continued relevance of the results a search engine delivers, it must continually modify the ‘rules’ by which it determines high rankings. As such, the entire process of SEO and SEM is an effort to identify those rules and leverage them to a website’s advantage, ultimately resulting in high rankings.
The outcome is influenced greatly by the nature of the industry, strength of online competition and the current position of the website online. However, our track-record of consistently achieving high search engine rankings for our clients speaks for itself.

Social Networking Surpasses E-mail

Click here to read a very informative summary of a recent Nielsen study on the use of social networking.