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It’s easy and free, and offers great search engine benefits, as well as LinkedIn’s own search engine. If you’ve not already got a LinkedIn company page then now’s the time…

Firstly you need to consider the keyword phrases your clients are using to find your business. This is something you should look at every 12 months as these change and you may be adding products and services you’ve not included on your site or on pages like LinkedIn.

I have a document I keep on my system that lays out my business areas and the key word phrases that are searched on to find my services.

You can research your keywords for free using the Google Keyword Tool.

Setting up your LinkedIn company page

1. Log into LinkedIn with your own profile.
2. Go to the “Companies” menu on LinkedIn. From there, select “Add Company”.
3. Enter basic information about your company, like its description, number of employees, and industry it operates in. Use the keywords and phrases you’ve researched.
4. Follow LinkedIn’s wizard for creating your company profile – you’ll be able to add a logo, locations, and a feed for your company blog.
5. Once you’ve completed LinkedIn’s steps for getting setup, your company profile will be available to everyone so make sure it represents you well.

Your Company Page

In the tabs at the top of your company page you’ll see Overview, Careers, Services and Analytics

OVERVIEW – This is your company description and also allows you to add status updates. This could be a new product, an event, a new service, a new client, a new case study, the opportunities are endless.

CAREERS – Is an area to advertise jobs with your company. Why pay huge recruitment fees when LinkedIn can help.

SERVICES – In this area you should list all your companies offerings and remember to use your keywords here as well.

ANALYTICS – Gives you a simple graphical view of how many people are looking at your entry and the pages they are viewing.

More about your company page

• In addition to showing off the basic information you provided, LinkedIn will pull in data about your company from around the site.
• So, for example, all of your job listings will automatically show up on your profile, along with links to the profiles of all current employees, former employees, new hires, and recent promotions. LinkedIn also does analysis of your company and the connections that your employees have on the network. For example, it will automatically calculate your company’s median age, top schools, and other companies that they are well-connected to.
• As you can imagine, all of this aggregate data about your company gives potential candidates (as well as anyone else interested in your company) a lot of information to dive into and help determine if it might be a good fit for them. And for you, once it’s setup, it all happens automatically as you and your employees use LinkedIn, though you can always make edits to your company’s basic profile information.
• From an SEO perspective this company page has huge value so add as much information as you can, including images and back links to your site for products an dservices, Facebook, etc.

If you have a any good tips and tricks for getting the most out of LinkedIn I’d love to hear them.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) blogging is a method of writing relevant and unique blog posts to help you reach high rankings on the search engines for specific keywords and long tail keyword phrases. It is focused on keywords in your blog posts that requires the linking of these keywords in the anchor text that links (deep linking) to the most relevant page on your website.

SEO blogging is a very good strategy to build up rankings if you are interested in a content marketing strategy. If your blog is on the same domain as your website, every new blog post that you publish counts as another page on your domain, giving you more visibility than only having a website.

Even though SEO blogging is excellent, there’s a couple of mistakes that you should avoid when you start with your SEO blogging journey.

SEO blogging mistakes

Don’t focus on every topic: Your blog should be narrowly focused around a central topic. This will establish relevance and also attracts the readers that are interested in what you write. A blog focused on wedding ideas will attract readership and consistent traffic. A blog that talks about wedding ideas, business help, internet marketing and news about investments is unfocused and fails to attract great rankings.

Not using keywords: When writing a new blog post, select one primary keyword phrase that you will center your blog post around. Two very common mistakes are either not focusing on any keywords or trying to focus on multiple keywords.

Not using keywords in the title: Always try to use the primary keyword or phrase in your blog post title. The search engines gives high importance to the words in a blog post title . When you write your blog post title, remember that you want to attract readers and satisfy the search engines.

Not using keywords in your content: Try to use your main keyword phrase at least 2-3 times in the content of your blog post.

Not using links: Use the keywords you have selected in the anchor text of your links that points to the most relevant page on your website. Doing it this way is a very powerful SEO blogging strategy.

Posting duplicate content: Every blog post that you publish should be unique and original. Try to avoid re posting the same content on your blog as this is seen as duplicate content.  Even though you can get away with not being slapped by Google through the usage of canonical URL’s, you won’t rank for duplicate content.

Not posting interesting content: If you post interesting and original content on your blog, you will attract links from other bloggers and this can make your postings more powerful and helps your content to travel.

Francois is a certified Digital Marketing consultant living in South Africa. He is a professional speaker, trainer and consultant and enjoys training people in social media, anywhere in the world.

Firstly a very Happy New Year to you. I feel 2012 will be far better than 2011 no matter what the negative attitude of our press and politicians may be.

In the good times the best people in their industries are always busy. They generally get new business only by recommendation and unless you can connect with them through this route it’s very hard to become one of their clients. The benefit of dealing with a great business partner is huge, but you don’t realise this until you find the real deal.

In difficult times even the best companies often have some spare capacity so it’s an ideal time to approach people you would really like on your side.

The problem many of us have is that once we’ve committed to a supplier we often never have the means to make a comparative performance evaluation to check we’ve made the best decision for our business.

Most of us stay with the same business partners or suppliers because we feel we’re getting a good service, the price is fair, and our relationship is strong. Some stay because it’s just too hard to look for another partner and the one they have is OK.

What if we could run a detailed competitive analysis on the results of our partners work against our top 5 competitors? We could then evaluate their performance and ensure we are getting the best advice and work possible.

In most industries this is very hard to do but NOT in Internet Marketing. Online we can measure success and a competitive analysis of you against your top 5 most irritating competitors can include:

• Web site performance: Accessibility, Marketing, Content, Technology.
• Search: PPC campaign data, The keywords your competitors are using, Pages indexed on their site, Inbound links, Scores for PPC, Top 20 performing pages, Content quality and Links.
• Social score: Blog posts, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, LinkedIn connections, YouTube subscribers and views.
• Ranking scores: for Search, Social impact, and Content

This is a lot of data but when presented in graphs and charts as an executive overview it offers incredible insights and the ability to see you and your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

You can drill down into the data to understand fully the underlying reasons for the observations and start to use this to attack your competitors where their weaknesses have been exposed.

What if all this was available now for far less money than you are probably thinking. Take a deeper look and a comprehensive competitor analysis.  At worst it shows your internet marketing partners you’re keeping an eye on them, but it may expose the fact you’re not dealing with the best business partner possible.