Branded For Success

The common misconception in branding is that your brand and branding your company are the same thing. They are definitely related, but they are definitely not the same thing. We you can grasp the fundamental difference between the two, you can leverage your brand more effectively. Confusion between the two can lead to problems establishing your brand because you might overlook something very important.

First, in their most basic sense, a brand is a concept and branding is communicating a brand concept. Did you catch it? A brand in an idea and branding is implementing that idea. To use an analogy, the brand is the bullet and branding is the gun. Branding applies the brand to your target market just like firing a gun at an intended target.

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The last two posts in this mini series dealt with finding keywords and then once you have found them, how to implement them on your site. This post really is the warning label for using keywords. You need to tread carefully because the integrity of your company’s brand is at stake. I am not trying to be sensational but I hope I have raised a red flag in your head and I hope you pay attention to it. When it comes to brand integrity, you should have a level of sensitivity to protect your company’s brand.

Just like in advertising, you do not want to say something that you are not or that you do not do. It will ruin your company’s reputation. So it is the same if you choose keywords for search engine optimization that really do not fit your company’s brand.

Examine this for a minute. Imagine that you are a jeweler of high quality, exquisite jewelry that you sell online.  You go ahead and do keyword research for your online business and find out that “cheap jewelry” is a highly searched and low competitive keyword (not likely but go with this). Then you decide to implement that keyword on your website hoping that you will get tons of organic search engine traffic. You just sunk your company brand.

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Last time we look at the importance of keywords and how to find them. So the next thing is, what is the proper placement of keywords?

They should be in places where both search engines and visitors will see them. Most often we forget to put them in places where visitors will not see them, but the search engines will.

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Keywords are the foundation to search engine ranking. They are where it all starts. It is what the search engines look for to know what your website is all about. With all the different formulas that exist to get ranked, it all boils down to the keywords for your web page/website. It is keywords that people use search for what they want on the Internet. The number one thing you can do to improve your search engine ranking is to improve your keyword use and selection on your website.

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