Archive for 'Internet marketing'

20 Content Ideas to Help Build Your Email List

Does your website have a signup form that looks like the following?

Do you wonder why no one is signing up for your monthly eNewsletter that you work very hard to produce?

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Don’t Wait Until it’s Too Late – Protect Your Online Assets

For many of us in service based businesses, our knowledge is our main asset. When we write about what we know, in our blog, in an ebook or out on the social web, we share that asset with many people to help them out and to attract them to our businesses. In addition, many of us have spent a lot of time and money on our Web or blog design, creating a brand identity that projects how we want people to perceive us and our businesses. So when I read about how someone’s blog or website was hacked and they lost their content, their brand and are trying to recover these assets, it’s time for a reminder post on WordPress security to protect your online assets. It’s something we all can do ourselves. We just need to remember! Read more on Don’t Wait Until it’s Too Late – Protect Your Online Assets…

Top Search Queries: Data to Help You Know How to Get Found

As I reviewed the information in the Google Webmaster Tools for one of my clients today, I noticed something different in the information being presented in the Top Search Queries report – it has expanded and now contains a lot of great information on how your site appears in the search results for various keywords. It just so happens that Google reported this new feature update in their blog just today: More Data & Charts in Top Search Queries. I love stumbling into something new!

Not only have they improved this report by giving you a significantly larger number of queries in the report, they have also provided detail that can help you determine how to improve your site’s ranking. And from a marketing perspective, this will help many small business owners determine how their websites are doing and what types of improvements they need to make to get better rankings.

What you get

You get the number of impressions and click-through information for each search query and each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query. Plus you also get the pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query. Read more on Top Search Queries: Data to Help You Know How to Get Found…

“Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips

It’s nice to be friendly and welcome your visitors to your website, but unless you are in the hospitality business, using Welcome! as your home page header and title is wasting valuable real estate when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). You can have welcoming content for your visitors without sacrificing the best practices of SEO. Remember that a website is your primary tool for marketing your business online and you need to do what it takes to ensure your website is found.

For those business owners that are writing the content for their website, keep these following on page SEO tips handy. Rather than provide the list in order of priority from an SEO perspective, I will present them in the order the human needs to address them. Read more on “Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips…

Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product

Another week and another client calls me to ask about yet another company claiming they can optimize his website and guarantee first page placement on Google. After doing my usual research, I find a Ripoff Report by an unhappy customer who felt they were taken for a lot of money. One unhappy customer does not make the company bad. But this exercise got me wondering about why so many of these SEO and PPC companies have so many complaints posted all over the Web?

SEO and PPC are Not Commodity Products

These companies that call small business owners trying to sell them their software to manage their SEO and PPC activities are trying to treat Search Engine Marketing as a commodity – a one size fits all so to speak. This is absolutely not the case and most likely the wrong business model for success.

Each of my client’s search engine marketing strategy is unique. It takes a deep understanding of their business, their customers and what they are trying to accomplish with their online marketing. It takes creating relevant content that appeals to their prospects and attracts them to their Website. And, what works for one company may not necessarily work for another.

Are there common elements to setting up search engine optimization or a pay-per-click advertising campaign? Absolutely. But what is a common exercise is just a piece of the search engine marketing puzzle. Read more on Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product…

Why You Should Control Your Online Marketing

I got a call from a small business owner yesterday that reminds me why I focus on helping small business owners market their businesses. It disheartens me when someone spends a substantial amount of money with a company for pay-per-click or SEO services that do not get them any results. These companies charge $500 – $3000 per month for these services of which only a percentage of it is applied to your actual campaign. The rest goes into their pockets. They also redirect your website to a copy that they maintain, replace your phone number with one of theirs (to measure phone calls from their services along with clicks) and basically eliminate any ranking you may have in the search engines. They basically hold you hostage.

In most cases, what they actually provide can be done yourself with a little knowledge or with someone who can help you get your advertising off the ground for a lot less. Here is how you get started.

Determining Your Keywords

Finding your keywords are easy to do yourself with tools such as Google AdWords External Keyword Tool or the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. Both enable you to plug in your website and they return keywords that they associate with your website. They provide search volume and competition for the keywords. The Google Search-based Keyword Tool also provides a suggested bid price if you want to set up an AdWords campaign. These keywords can be exported so you can organize them into groups for optimizing your pages of your website or to build your pay-per-click campaigns. Read more on Why You Should Control Your Online Marketing…

Five Easy Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Website

I highly recommend that all small businesses use WordPress for their Website. Even if you have no plans to blog, a WordPress website gives you control of your content so you can keep it fresh and relevant to your target audience. The following are a few tips that will help you get visibility in the search engines.

Make your permalinks pretty

This is an easy setting but one I’ve seen overlooked on many, many WordPress sites. The default setting is http://yourdomain.com/?p=123. How useful is that? If you leave your permalinks set this way, you lose all the value of those keywords that you used in the title of your post or page. Instead, select the custom option and set the format to /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/. Add the category if you have been strategic with naming your categories using your main keywords. Otherwise, use just the post name and make sure you use keywords in their titles. Read more on Five Easy Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Website…

Don’t Wait for Perfection

Striving for perfection is a nice goal, but sometimes waiting for perfection can hold you back.

The beauty of marketing on the Internet is that, in most cases, you can test, change, modify and update your campaigns once they go live. Having everything completely perfect prior to getting out there and being seen is no longer a necessity. It is more important to take action and become visible, even if it’s not perfect, than sit around and wait.

Recently, I’ve noticed this trend of waiting for perfection with some small business owners. The problem with this strategy is:

• The longer you wait, the more chance you give your competition to be found before you, potentially stealing the thunder from something you thought was unique;
• The Web changes too quickly to worry about finding small imperfections that can be fixed quickly once they are discovered;
• Marketing takes time to work and waiting just lengthens the time before you will see results.

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