Integral Online Marketing Tops Search Engines

Our company, Integral OM, ranks #1 for the term ‘integral online marketing’. See for yourself on Google or Yahoo! How about a more common phrase like ‘holistic online marketing‘? I’m pretty sure we’re on page 1 for that one, too.

It took us four months between blog posts for this ego inflating boastfulness?!? Hey, we’ve been busy helping our clients make more money through search marketing and conversion optimization.

We’ll try to do better with posting more frequently, but for now, let’s make this a little less self serving.

Fresh Content

We preach to our clients that we need to post new content to their blogs weekly or bi-weekly at minimum. Why? The search engine spiders like to see a pattern of regular updates to our sites and blogs. Every time you create a blog post, you create a new page to be indexed by the search engines. If they determine your pattern of posting is frequent, they are more likely to visit your site and index your new pages frequently.

So why is Integral OM ranking so well for these terms? It sure isn’t the frequent blog posting! There are a couple factors at work:

Site Architecture

Our site isn’t complex by a long shot. We’re using the Wordpress blog platform for our site but are able to have a static home page, about, contact, etc. If you configure Wordpress correctly (we use the Semiologic theme), it will do a great job helping you with your SEO. New sites, with new domains, can take some time to get indexed by Google. Our site was indexed and ranking in a matter of a couple days thanks to our architecture and some simple social marketing promotion techniques! Sandbox shmandbox…

If you look at the pages (I know… it won’t take long), observe the text links in the navigation and within the posts. The underlined, blue text is called ‘anchor text’ and the search engines determine, with good reason, that this text is important. When you determine through your methodical research what keyword phrases you want to rank high in the SERPs for be sure you use these phrases in your anchor text within your own site. This is all part of the internal linking strategy.

Off Page Factors

Depending on the level of competition for your niche, the action that happens away from your site can have a significantly greater impact than the content and architecture of your site. Don’t get me wrong, you need to do the right things on your site but if you want to rank well in a competitive niche, you have to work on creating inbound links (popularity) to your site. We’re not talking garbage links that some unscrupulous vendor may offer - links that can be determined to be part of a bad neighborhood and completely discounted. Think of links as a way to promote your site. You want good links, whether it is a simple text link from a niche relevant site, or links from a good article that provides real value for the reader. This is something you can do today!

Competition

Since we’re #1, we must have lots of inbound links, right? Ummm… we have a few but the answer lies in the competitiveness of the example terms I’ve mentioned. They simply don’t have a lot of competition… yet. We feel all agencies should practice integral or holistic marketing so we’re evangelizing. Tangent alert! I’m back. If we want to rank for the more difficult ‘Colorado SEO‘, we have a little more work to do. As of today, we haven’t cracked page 10. Let’s see what we can do about that!