Marketing Articles

Article / Updated 05-31-2022

In web marketing, it’s important to make sure your site is visible. Checking your robots.txt file and meta robots tags is a good place to start. Errors with these can make your site invisible to visitors. Check your robots.txt file Go to www.yoursiteaddress.com/robots.txt . You might get a Page Not Found error. That’s okay for your purposes: A no robots.txt file means you’re not placing any broad limits on what search engines can and can’t index on your site. You might also see something like this: User-agent: * Disallow: /blog.htm This file is called the robots.txt file. It tells search engine crawlers, also known as robots, what to do when they visit your website. In this example, it’s telling all search engines to ignore the blog.htm page. All other pages are searchable. If you want to become a robots.txt geek, visit the Web Robots Page. You can find out everything you ever wanted to know about guiding robots around your site. What you don’t want to see in your robots.txt file is this: Disallow: / This line tells a visiting search engine crawler to ignore every page on your website. A developer may add this line when he is building the site to prevent search engines from crawling it while it’s under construction. If it is left there by accident, your site is invisible to search engines. If your robots.txt file has any Disallow commands in it, check with your webmaster or developer to make sure that a reason exists. Disallow can be used to hide pages that change a lot, hide duplicate content, or keep search engines out of stuff you just don’t want them crawling. Just make sure that you’re not accidentally hiding content they should see. Check for meta robots tags Using the meta robots tag is another way to hide pages from search engines. Go to any page on your website and view the source code. You don’t want to see If the meta robots tag is there, and it contains noindex , nofollow , or both, remove it. You have valid reasons to use this tag: You might want a search engine to ignore this page because it’s a duplicate; you might feel the information on the page is inappropriate for search results; or the developer might have hidden the page during development. If you don’t know the reason, delete the tag. Do not trust your developer to remove the meta robots tag. When he builds your site, he’s working hard, writing code so fast that his fingers smoke. Forgetting to remove that one little line of code is easy when you’re facing a tough deadline and still have 4,000 lines of code to write. Remind your developer!

Cheat Sheet / Updated 05-09-2022

Account-based marketing flips the marketing funnel on its head. You start with your best-fit prospects and turn them into resources for both long-term business and new prospects.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-25-2022

The world of marketing, sales, and lead generation has plenty of jargon, so here's a glossary of terms to help you know what's what. Also, here is a round-up of eight incredibly useful free apps that help you with everything from evaluating your website for broken links and good search engine optimization (SEO) to determining how engaging your marketing emails are.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-25-2022

Effective SEO (search engine optimization) is critical for any business that has a website. You want your business’s website to show up on that first page when people search for what you’re selling, and that’s where SEO comes into play. Here you’ll find the key components of a website that should be crafted with care to help a web page rank, the server status codes that help or hinder SEO, and advanced search operators that will have you searching the web like a pro.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-13-2022

YouTube has a lot of options to offer a marketer — so much so, it can feel overwhelming, making it hard to know where to start. The top questions from marketers at companies big and small come up time and again. This cheat sheet aims to answer some of your common queries about YouTube marketing and give you a few easy jumping off points to reach your target audience.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 04-12-2022

Growth hacking is the process of continually and rapidly testing, across the customer journey, to learn about activities that can be systemized as processes to grow the value that a business provides its customers. A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth. It is this person’s job to find scalable, repeatable, and sustainable ways to grow the business. This cheat sheet can help.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-25-2022

White papers are the “king of content” that can help any B2B company build mindshare, generate leads, engage prospects, and undercut competitors. But to get powerful results, you need to use white papers effectively. Make sure to provide useful information that can help a business person understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-23-2022

Digital marketing is continually evolving. New technologies enhance your ability to collect information about your customers and how they view you. This cheat sheet provides you with advice you can immediately put into practice to engage your customers and track their opinions of you.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-18-2022

Facebook's social networking website offers a free, online location to market your business, organization, or individual to the Facebook community. The Facebook page for business is fun and easy to set up, and it provides a powerful set of online tools that lets you fully engage with your customers. But to efficiently market your business in Facebook, it helps to understand the underlying principles that make all these connections possible.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-25-2022

A brand is so much more than a pretty logo. To win loyal customers, you need to develop a story that represents the quality and character of your organization or product. By then telling that story consistently across all channels and backing it up with exceptional customer service, you gain all the benefits (and profits) that come from being a trusted name in the marketplace.