The Marketing Maven: Industrial Marketing Blog & B2B Marketing Tips

10 Low-Cost Tactics to Market Your Business

With many budgets getting crunched, marketers may need to pay special attention to low-cost marketing tactics that can help their companies. Many of these ideas can be implemented using your current resources and some extra elbow grease in the form of time and hard work. And they can all help raise the visibility of your company and make your overall marketing more effective.

Some of these tactics you may already be doing, others may be new ideas. In either case, make the most of them to achieve marketing benefits with minimal costs.

Corporate Blogging: Getting Started and Keeping it Fresh

Recently we wrote about Seven Ways to Keep your Web Site Content Fresh. One of the ways discussed was to begin a blog. However, if you haven't started one yet, it may seem overwhelming.

Mark Jackson, the President and CEO of Vizion Interactive, has been involved in interactive marketing since 2000. In his article Blogging for Search Engine Optimization he offers some advice to make it less intimidating. Specifically he discusses whether you should use a sub-domain, sub-directory, or a completely separate domain for your corporate blog.

Once you've set up the blog, or if you already have one, it isn't always easy to know what to write. This article by Peter Da Vanzo, editorial director at SEO Book, How To Overcome Writers Block offers seven suggestions to try when you aren't sure what to write.

Regardless of whether your blog is new or one you've managed for some time, it is important to remember that keeping content fresh is a very important strategy for search engine optimization.

Search friendly URL's can only help ranking

A lot of work goes into putting a web-site together: content creation, page design, and site architecture are all important elements. One element that may seem obvious but is often overlooked is the URL for each page. In his article URL Best Practices and Guidelines Reminder, Jody Nimetz of Enquiro Search Solutions Inc. offers a list of best practices to consider when creating and or revising the URL's for your site. Jody Nimtez is an on-line marketing specialist who offers tips and advice on his blog Marketing Jive.

SEO Tips for Industrial Marketers

And a new white paper available for download

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help your company’s Web pages rise higher in the search engine results for specific keyword searches. Done correctly, SEO can help you attract motivated prospects to your Web site in real time as they search online for products and services like those you offer.

Engaging in some level of SEO will be of benefit to most companies. Your level of involvement depends on your goals, expertise and resources. Some simple yet effective SEO techniques can be performed with limited expertise and resources, while other, more complex techniques require SEO experts and technical skills.

Here are 10 SEO tips that most industrial marketers should be able to execute without too much strain on their resources. 

Promoting your news

While building content for your site is an important optimization strategy; you can't count on content to purely drive traffic.

Justilien Gaspard, an independent consultant who focuses on organic search, has written a series of articles on building newsworthy content. In the this week's article, Create Something Newsworthy, Part 3 -- Promotions he offers tips to promote your content.

He began the series with Create Something Newsworthy -- Branding, Marketing, Links and continued it in his post Create Something Newsworthy, Part 2 -- Testing.  

Important considerations for page titles in regards to optimization

Optimizing title pages can help Web sites rank higher in search engine queries, but what should you do if the keyword or phrase being targeted has both singular and plural terms such as "Industrial Automation Consultant" vs. "Industrial Automation Consultants"?

Michael Gray who has been active in web development and website management for over ten years and is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land. In his article How To Optimize Your Page Titles For Singular & Plural Terms he provides some tips on creating titles and changing the order of words in a sentence to include both singular and plural versions of a keyword in order to optimize pages for ranking in search results.

Keeping Up with Search Engines to Maintain Ranking

If you are responsible for search engine marketing within your company, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to stay on top of the latest changes to algorithms on major search engines, especially Google.

Aaron Wall is a search engine marketing expert who writes the blog SEOBook. In his post Google's New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding he helps explain the latest changes to Google's algorithm, and provides a helpful history of prior changes as well.

This change emphasizes the need to maintain your company's messaging and brand throughout the site. Being aware of the technology behind search is useful, but we should never forget the importance of content.