Millions of people use Google everyday to look for a product, service or information. I guarantee that a substantial amount of these people are potential clients looking for your particular service or product.  Below are eight ways I’ve found that can help increase your Google page rank.

1. Know Your Current Page Rank: The first step to increase your Google ranking is to know your current Page Rank. Visit PR Checker to find out.

2. Submit Your Site: You want the search engine spiders to come to your site and start indexing it into their database.

3. Quality Page Content: Make sure to update your website or blog regularly. Good content will increase your ranking. It’s that simple. More good, relevant content means more visitors. This eventually leads to other sites linking to your pages.

4. Link Often: Google looks at both inbound and outbound links. One of the easiest ways to increase your Page Rank is to exchange links with other websites or blogs that have similar content.

5. Social Networking: Submit your website or blog posts to popular sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Facebook and Twitter. These sites will help you generate backlinks.

6. Make Your Graphics Search Friendly: Keep Flash to a minimum. People may enjoy reading Flash, but search engines tend to skip over it.

7. Clean-coded Site: Make sure that your website’s coding is clean and simple so it’s easy for web crawlers to crawl the content.

8. Use Meta Tags: Include Meta keywords, Meta descriptions and page titles on every page.

Within the B2B industry, your website can mean everything to your potential customers. Prospects want useful information and they want to get it fast, without making a huge effort, which is why it’s important for B2B companies to provide relevant web content.

The article Website Content Tips, offers six tips to ensure your web content grabs the attention of potential customers. Tips include:

1. Chunk content
2. Use instructive headings
3. Format for scannability:
   1. Bold information-rich keywords
   2. Use bulleted and numbered lists
   3. Consider tables to convey and compare information that can easily get lost in text
4. Use anchor points
5. Be clear and concise
6. Employ good design

So remember, it is extremely important to have organization and flow throughout your website and to communicate your message clearly. By doing this, you will increase your SEO and distinguish yourself from your competition. Let your audience know why your product and/or service is the best!

As a designer working in B2B marketing, I’m always looking for new and unique tools that can take my projects to the next level. Below are five Wordpress Plugins that I found that can help enhance blogs.

1. HeadSpace2 SEO: Wordpress SEO made simple. With this amazing all-in-one meta-data manager, you can fine-tune the SEO potential of your blog, including configuration of meta-data for posts, pages, categories, setting tags/keywords, descriptions and page titles.

2. WPtouch iPhone Theme: Customize many aspects of your blog’s appearance and turn it into a stylish smartphone Web site that visitors can view on their iPhone, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre or Blackberry.

3. Thank Me Later: Automatically e-mail anyone who comments on your blog. Or, you can set   it  up to send a message to all first-time visitors welcoming them and reminding them to sign up for the RSS feed. It also lets you send messages after a pre-defined amount of time, making them appear more unique.

4. Wordpress Related Posts: Generate related posts and add them to the feed. Once a visitor reads your post, they can read other suggested posts and keep clicking through your blog.

5. Polldaddy: Create polls that can easily be embedded into your posts, pages or sidebar via the widgets panel. There’s also a cool reports section in your WP control panel that displays results.

Have you used any of these Plugins? Do you use other Plugins to add features to your blog?

I have social media on the brain. Again.

It’s evolving, mysterious and a blank canvas for marketing creativity and strategy. I think it’s safe to say that everyone involved in social media is learning as they go. And, while there are some nay-sayers about ROI for social media, there is one point that can’t be argued. Social media can help improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), when done effectively, of course.

So, HOW can social media improve your SEO?

1. Direct Links. Social media sites provide links. Lots of links. Google likes links. Google ranks sites with lots of links to them higher than those with very few links. Add links to your Web content on sites like Twitter or leave comments on blogs with relevant links to your site.
2. Keyword-optimized content. Have you noticed Tweets showing up in Google search results? Google and Yahoo index Tweets, so keep adding content to social media platforms for added visibility. The more valuable your content, the more likely someone else is to share it with their network.

How are you optimizing your social media content? Here are some helpful tools for Social Media Optimization.