SEO Blog

I recently read a very interesting article from Search Engine Watch that covered a very hot new topic in digital marketing. In the last year or so, a new social media site has taken the internet by storm. In the last week of January alone, the site generated 21.5 million views. The website is currently the third most popular social networking site in the United States, according to a report from Experian.

Pinterest is the latest and greatest tool being used to connect to other people over the web. The site is a “virtual pinboard”, where users can post all of their favorite images (from recipes to area rugs) to their own personal page. Since a majority of the “pinned” photos are beloved retail products, there is huge potential for businesses to successfully integrate Pinterest into their digital marketing plans.

As the rise of social media continues, it is becoming more and more imperative for companies to establish a presence on those sites. Pinterest is much different than its other counterparts (like Twitter and Facebook) in that its users focus less upon friends, and more upon their personal interests.

Approximately 60 percent of individuals using the site are female, and 55 percent of the women on the site are between the ages of 25 and 44. With so many members of such a sought after demographic in one place, integrating Pinterest into your marketing plan can add to your bottom line.

One of the most successful ways that companies have engaged Pinterest users is by creating their own branded profiles, where they create pinboard albums containing their products and their prices. To create customer awareness of brand products, some companies have held giveaway contests.

Pinterest even makes marketing research adaptable and effective. Testing out a new ad campaign on Pinterest will provide you with quick results, likely measured by the number of “repins” received. By allowing customers to “co-pin” a board, you can gain insightful information into customer interests.

With the evolvement of social media, new doors to reaching customers have been opened. Pinterest’s stunning popularity provides an entirely new, more personal method of reaching customers. The possibilities are virtually endless.

This article was written by Sarah Schwitters, Chief Marketing Strategist at lodestar marketing group. To receive help with integrating Pinterest or other social media into your marketing strategy, contact us at digitalmarketing@lodestarmg.com

In today’s competitive online market, businesses are doing all that they possibly can to get their name toward the top of a page of search engine results. There are plenty of simple and effective ways to propel your business to the top of the page, such as a paid or organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) service.

Though this seems like a fair and simple method of successful marketing, some companies (and hackers alike) think it necessary to use an antagonistic, unethical, and punishable method known as Black Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO practices are put into action with one goal in mind: scoring search engine results. Using deceptive methods, known as “spamdexing” or “cloaking”, that most users won’t notice, users of Black Hat SEO bypass the rules of the search engine world. Although these methods are not yet liable to be penalized by the government, a company’s internet presence can almost be completely erased by search engines (to read more, take a look at Google’s battle with Overstock.com

Although an exact, concise definition is relatively vague, Black Hat SEO qualifies as anything that uses artificial or unpaid means to greatly boost search results for a very short period of time.

Some of the most popular methods include:

• Keyword Stuffing— packing a webpage chock-full with lists of search engine keywords, and very little relevant information
• Doorway Pages— HTML pages that are written so that they can only be seen by search engines and search engine spiders; these pages are designed to make it appear as though the site has many more page views than they actually do
• Invisible Text— a method of hiding lists of keywords on the background of page, often by making the text and the background the same color
• “Bait and Switch”— loading page with a popular keyword, even though the page has no content relevant to the actual search
• Meta-Tag Stuffing— using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content, or repeating keywords in the meta tags

The schemes used in Black Hat SEO are more time consuming and dangerous to your business than they are beneficial, and search engines can be rather unforgiving with their penalties. On March 24^th, 2012, Google established a new penalty known as the Google Webspam (or Penguin) Update that cracks down much harder than ever before on Black Hat SEO—and even on legal, “over-optimized” websites. With increasing penalties and a greater ability to search out Black Hat SEO users, the costs of utilizing these techniques are increasingly outweighing the benefits of using them.

This entry was written by Derek Schwitters, CEO and Chief Digital Strategist at lodestar marketing group. If you’d like to know how to safely and successfully implement SEO into your website, don’t hesitate to contact us at digitalmarketing@lodestarmg.com.