Tag: Online Presence

Are you ready to get serious about your online presence?

Your Online Presence in Your Personal and Business Branding

In today’s online world, it is crucial to pay attention to your online presence and the many ways in which ‘a potential customer’ can discover more about you or your business.

As an example, if you are looking for a job, you need to be aware of your digital footprint — the information connected with your name online. This is two-fold however as if you are a business, you definitely want to come up in the SERP (search engine result pages) when someone needs your product or service.

Forbes Magazine says: “For most customers in the 21st Century, their first introduction to a business is by discovering the business online. That’s why each and every business needs to have a strong online presence.” ~ Full Article at Forbes.com

And while your personal and business presence may seem like distant cousins, they are more like brother and sister. Each has its own set of pros and cons, and you should examine — if not leverage — each of those.

Some of them are:

• The topic(s) of your content
• Your overriding branding and character of that brand
• Your message frequency
• Your public-facing follow through in online message boards/forums/help centres
• The quality of your publically presented messages and images
• … and more… (contact me to discuss further)

So how are you approaching your own online presence? Let’s dive a bit deeper…

Website Optimization, SEO, and Your Online Presence

Let’s face it, none of us really know for certain what are the algorithms of Google, Bing or other search engines. Google — the owner of the 2 biggest search engines: Google.com and YouTube.com — keeps a tight lid on the actual formula, but they do give hints as to what they are looking to achieve regarding their users’ experience.

According to MOZ: “A webpage doesn’t always look the same to you and me as it looks to a search engine.” ~ Full Article at Moz.com

That all said, optimizing your site for its message, its focus keyword & content friendliness, and its code, is a synergy that just cannot be ignored these days.

If you use a WordPress site (like I do),  I recommend the Yoast plugin. According to Wiki: “Yoast is currently considered the most comprehensive search engine optimization software available for WordPress users, with its developers responsible for over 10% of WordPress releases.”

FYI –  WordPress is reportedly the most popular website management or blogging system in use on the Web, supporting more than 60 million websites — that means that about 6million WordPress sites use Yoast.

Being Visible Online

Being visible and top-of-mind is a science all on its own. The online world is full of opportunities for promoting your business. If you desire to grow your client base, then being found, being visible, and connecting with prospects and clients online, is going to be very important for you.

To ensure you will be visible online, you will need to address the following elements:

Your Relevant Content: This goes for both Social Media and your website. Your website content should contain the words and phrases that clients would use to search for your type of business. Now no ‘keyword spamming’; the recommended keyword density is 2.5%.

The Quantity of Your Content: The more written content you have on your website the more there is for Google to find, rank and return in their results. A very effective way to add regular new content to your website is by publishing a blog.

Good Coding Practices and Meta-Tags: On the technical side, the coding that sits behind your website pages should include relevant page titles, descriptions and keyword tags.

Links: Quality links to and from your website are important to search engines because they can indicate relevance and popularity.

Your Social Media Online Presence

Ah, Social Media, It is kind of hard to even think about being online without it anymore.

However, for your business, Social Media is an important part of your online presence. It improves your chances of generating additional connections and generating customer loyalty, allowing customers — and potential customers — the ability to easily engage beyond the sale.