When I search for you, what do I find?

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

This children’s rhyme does not apply in today’s highly connected world where a few negative words can cost your company a lot of business. Now everything from quality reviews and recommendations, legitimate issues and reputation damaging complaints are there for the entire world to see.

Managing your online reputation is no longer optional and needs a simple strategy that combines monitoring what is available about you and responding appropriately to ensure your business is not unknowingly damaged by negative comments.

Even if you have never added your information into Yelp, Yahoo Local, Google Places or other online business directories, it doesn’t mean that your business isn’t already visible online and immune from the backlash of an unhappy customer.

How should businesses approach online reputation management?

Because of its critical nature to the success of your business, you need to proactively manage your online reputation. It’s not something you should leave up to someone else because when it comes to responding and engaging your audience, you should handle that personally. Here are 5 tips to get you started:

• Regularly monitor your brand’s reputation – Search for your business name and see what comes up. Doing a vanity search helps you identify not only where you are listed but also what is being said about your company. You want to be sure your information is accurate and complete. Set up Google Alerts for your name and your business name and choose whether you want email updates or an RSS update. You can also use Google’s Me On the Web, a tool that helps you manage search results on your name.
  

  "Me on the Web" in Google's Dashboard

• Claim your local business listings – According to Google, 97% of consumers search for local businesses online so you need to be visible in a crowded local market. When a listing is claimed, it sends a message that the business is open and ready to help. Unclaimed listings make your business seem out of touch. Make sure the content in the listing is accurate and optimized to include your top keyword phrases to get better visibility for local searches.
• Stay or get more active online – It’s difficult to remove negative information so your best option is to create more interesting and positive content to push the negative down and out of the first few pages of the search results. If you can make the time, start a blog. If you aren’t ready to commit to your own blog, guest post or post comments on other blogs. Update your status on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter regularly. Google wants fresh content so the more you post, the more content you will have in the search results, moving a not so favorable review out of site.
• Encourage customers to write reviews about your business- It’s not easy to ask customers for online reviews, but you need to get your best customers to speak on your behalf. Add a note to your invoice asking “How did we do?” and point them to your website. Create a big “Write a Review” button on your website which takes them to a testimonials page that contains links to your Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp, InsiderPages or other online review sites. This makes it easy for you to point them to one place where they can click a link and write a review.
  

  Ask your best customers for reviews

• Respond to negative comments and reviews immediately – You cannot ignore what is being posted about your brand online. Reviews, both good and bad, will happen whether you want them or not. Most rational people understand that you can never please everyone all the time, so a couple of unflattering reviews are expected. But if all I find are negative comments, I will question the integrity of the company. Take the high road and respond to negative reviews and try to resolve them quickly. Respond as you, the business owner and be visible, authentic, concerned and humble about the situation. This will alleviate fears and send the message that your company is concerned about their customers. (Then strive to get happy customers to post positive reviews!)

For most of us, monitoring and managing our online reputation is not that difficult. It takes a little time to monitor what is out there and determine what you need to do to respond or change the perception. This exercise is important to create the image you want your prospects and customers to see. Even if you don’t have any negative content about you, you still have work to do to create an image that is visible, credible and consistent with your brand.

A Word of Caution

If you think you need help, buyer beware. Do a little research and you will discover another industry that has its share of unethical companies. Many of these “reputation management experts” are the same “SEO experts” that I have previously warned you about. Their reputation management services use black hat SEO and other questionable tactics to bury the negative content in the search engine rankings. Once again, when it comes to your web presence, be cautious about who you trust to help you.

Do you know how your business is perceived by your customers and prospects?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

5 Tips for Managing Your Online Reputation is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Your brand identity, website, domain name, email list, customer list, white papers, presentations, pay-per-click advertising, social media, directory sites or any platform that houses your important marketing content, are critical assets to your business.

Why are these online marketing assets critical?

Let’s take a look at what these assets mean to your business:

• Your domain name is associated with your business and most likely is your business name. Your website and blog, built using that domain name, provide online visibility to your prospects and customers. If you were ready to sell your business, these assets would be valuable to the new business owner. Did you register the domain name under an account you own (i.e. like Godaddy or Network Solutions) or did someone do it for you?
• Your Google Places page is another online asset that provides information on your business location for local search such as phone numbers, directions and reviews. Is your Google Places page verified in your Google account or in someone vendor’s account?
• Your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools associated with your site are important tools to assess the effectiveness of your online presence. Are you the owner of these accounts or did someone else set them up and provide only reports to you?
• Are you running Google AdWords or other pay-per-click advertising for your business? If so, did you set up the accounts and have someone managing it or did you have an outside agency set it up for you? Is the money you spend monthly all going towards clicks or is some being pocketed by the agency?

Why am I concerned about who controls these assets?

A couple of things happened this week that reminded me that many small business owners still don’t understand the value of their online presence, are totally unaware of their online reputation and have fallen prey to unscrupulous “online marketing experts”. Unfortunately, these experts target small local businesses that need to be online but don’t have the time or expertise to do it themselves. And once in their hands, it is very hard to regain control. For example:

• A small business owner was spending $700 per month in pay-per-click campaigns but had no idea what keywords they were bidding on, how much each keyword cost or how much of this money was actually being spent on clicks. Lesson learned: Set up your PPC accounts directly with a credit card and work with someone who can set up and manage your campaigns through your account.

• Another was unaware that his domain name was expiring and a disgruntled web developer chose not to tell him. His website and email disappeared, the domain expired and the business has to wait the redemption period (about 30 days) for him to register it under his own name. Unfortunately, in 30 days Google will have dropped many of his website’s pages from the index and when the site returns, it will basically have to start over. Lesson learned: Never let someone else register your domain name unless you are totally confident that you can trust that person. Someone you trust will most likely tell you to register it yourself.
• A local business had his Google Places page and other local business listings set up by a local search firm using their accounts, not one from the business owner. When the local business decided to discontinue working with this firm, they refused to release the Google Places page so the owner could claim it. Lesson learned: Claim your Google Places page and other local business listings yourself or hire someone to do it on your behalf through accounts you have already set up.

When you want to hire an external resource to help you with your online marketing, just remember to think through what happens if you decide to discontinue working with them.

• Do you still have access to your accounts?
• Can you take over the management of the campaigns?
• Will remnants of these efforts remain long after your relationship with these agencies end, such as phone numbers you don’t own showing up associated with your business in the search results?
• Will your online presence remain visible on the Internet or will you need to start over?

My Advice

Take inventory of all of your online assets and determine who has ownership. This can be done by your office manager or an intern who can search for your business and record the information they find. Once you have that data, determine how you will claim all the properties and update the information so that it accurately reflects your business.

Do you have control of your online marketing assets?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Online Marketing Assets – Why You Must Be In Control is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

A successful web presence that attracts your ideal client and makes a great first impression is now much more complex, incorporating not only your website and blog, but also your social media profiles, business directories and review sites.

It’s no longer enough to just have a website. Your website is just one component of a complex network of information about your business that projects your brand and expertise to those in search of a product or solution.

The opportunity to develop an solid web presence as part of your online marketing is immense. A well thought-out plan can help you gain visibility, develop an expert reputation and create a large digital footprint that attracts attention of your ideal prospects.

There are many steps and tactics to make your web presence effective that will be different depending on your business model. But regardless of your tactics, there are six overarching elements that are required for successfully creating a powerful web presence.

1. Solid Strategy

Developing a web presence strategy is not a difficult exercise as it should be integrated into your overall marketing strategy. If you have your marketing strategy defined, include the following additional information:

• Figure out your goals for this effort. Are you looking to increase visibility, obtain an expert reputation or drive inbound leads? Knowing what you are trying to achieve heads you towards the right activities and eliminates wasting time on exercises that won’t get you where you want to go.
• Understand all the places that your business listing can be found and determine which ones are worth the time to claim. Do a search for your business name and catalog the various directories where it is listed. Compiling this list helps you understand the overall effort it will take to pull it all together and help you plan your time and resources.

2. Coherent and Consistent Brand

Web Presence - 6 Elements to Ensure Success

Is every place I can find a reference to your company consistent in what it says and how it looks?

Think about how many businesses that have a similar name to yours. When someone searches for your business and finds you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+, or finds your Google Places page or a listing on a review site, including the Better Business Bureau, will they immediately know it is you?

To ensure people always recognize your web properties and to build a recognizable expert brand, be consistent in all you do including using the same design elements such as color, images and logos. When a visitor finds your business, make sure there is no doubt that they have found the right business.

3. Continuous Participation

You can’t just set it and forget it. You have to be present regularly to respond to questions, participate in conversations and acknowledge those who mention you on social sites. You also need to keep content flowing regularly, updating your blog, offering new content to your visitors and sharing content from others you find interesting.

On the local search front, it is also not enough to just let your business listings lay dormant. Seek them out and claim them, ensuring your company name, address, phone numbers and all other relevant information is accurate and consistent. To search engines, Masterful Marketing and Masterful Marketing, LLC are not the same.

4. Relevant Content

Creating the right content for your audience is difficult, but if you create a content strategy that defines what you are going to write and a content marketing strategy to define how you will use that great content to gain visibility, you will be more likely to be found when your audience is searching for a solution. Get their attention and help them out of a problem and you become a valuable resource they will keep going back to for advice.

5. Ongoing Optimization

You have an opportunity to optimize your web presence, including website, social profiles and business listings using your top keyword phrases. Once again, you can’t just set it and forget it because search engines change how they index web pages frequently, so you need to produce new content and incorporate basic SEO components to stay visible and highly ranked in the search engine results.

6. Religious Review

Periodically do a review of your web presence to be sure all listings are kept up to date. If something changes, update it across all properties. If you get a review on one of the review sites, know about it. You never want to be surprised by a good or bad review. Keep a spreadsheet of all the sites where you have claimed your listing so you can keep them updated when necessary.

How does your business look to searchers?

Web presence takes a commitment in time, effort and persistence, but the payoff is huge. Ensuring that all of your web properties work together to project the consistent image and professional reputation you want is important to getting found regularly. Make this the year that you commit to your online web presence and make it the best that it can be.

Have you done a web presence analysis and put together your plan?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

6 Critical Elements to Guarantee a Successful Web Presence is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

A “call-to-action” refers to active copy that compels a user to do something such as watch a video demo, download a useful tool or sign up for your mailing list. Visitors that find your website by searching may find what they are looking for, but don’t let that opportunity to capture their attention slip away by not providing them with an offer.

On the other hand, if you drive a visitor to your website through a marketing campaign and don’t provide a clear call-to-action, you run the risk of them getting confused, frustrated and leaving without connecting with you. Offer your visitors compelling content and something that benefits them and they will do what you want them to do.

But like other marketing activities, you need a strategy to focus you on what you are trying to accomplish.

Define the purpose of your Website

Do you want to:

• Develop your expert reputation? Encourage visitors to subscribe to your blog, connect with you on Twitter and LinkedIn or “like” your Facebook page.
• Build your email list? Offer a valuable free tool in exchange for their email address and name.
• Generate leads? Provide a free 30 minute consultation or a whitepaper that discusses one of their challenges and how to overcome them.
• Sell a product or service? Offer a free trial (software), a free chapter of your information product or provide valuable free “stuff” if you register for an event.

Once you have your goals and their priority, you can now design the call-to-action copy and buttons into your website so that they can be easily found.

Tips to make your call-to-action attractive to your visitors

Once you have your goals and understand which ones are the most important, create your offer and use creative website design techniques to make it visible.

• Put them on every page.
• Use colorful buttons to draw attention to your offers.
• Place them above the fold and at the top of your sidebar.
• Keep them simple and limit the number on any one page (it can paralyze people into making no decision)
• Use action oriented verbs and avoid “click here” whenever possible.
• Create short forms and ask only for the information you need.
• Use multiple offers that help those who aren’t ready to commit still take an action (watch a video vs. download)

An often overlooked opportunity

Put the same call-to-action as you have on the page into your meta description tag that is used to describe your page in search engine listings. When searchers see your description, a good call-to-action will encourage them to click through to your website from the major search engines.

What’s your strategy?

Think through how you want to weave an effective call-to-action strategy into your website structure. Don’t leave it to chance that the visitor will figure out what they are suppose to do and actually do it. Understand the goal of your website, create compelling offers for your visitors and convert new visitors into followers, repeat visitors and potentially new customers.

What ideas have you used to get your visitors to take action? Share your successes!

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Website Call-to-Action Strategy is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Web presence analysis

A Web presence analysis is an exercise that helps you determine how your business is perceived when someone searches for your area of expertise. Important to your online marketing strategy, this analysis answers questions such as:

• How well can your business be found when someone searches?
• Is your brand consistent across all of your online properties?
• How is your business seen with respect to your competition?

Evaluating how you are perceived online will help you pinpoint areas that need attention, enabling you to develop a better online marketing plan that focuses on these specific areas and puts activities in place that will improve the effectiveness of your online marketing.

Web Presence Analysis Overview

A Web presence analysis should include:

• Keyword analysis and research – For your top keyword phrases, where do you rank if at all?
• Search engine visibility – How well can I find you and what is missing?
• Website structure analysis – Does your website lack the proper items that lead to being found?
• Social media analysis – Is your social presence consistent and well integrated with other social properties and your website?
• Competitive understanding – How do you compare to your competitors?

To get started and to make this task easier, I suggest you download and install the SEO Toolbar for Firefox from SEOBook, a set of SEO tools in one convenient toolbar that enables you to gather a wealth of information about your website and those of your competitors that will help in the analysis.

Step 1 – Keyword Analysis and Research

For those of you who follow this blog regularly, you know that I am pretty anal when it comes to researching and then using your top keyword phrases in your web content, your social media profiles and all of your marketing activity. If you search this blog, you’ll find a post or two that talk about the reason for doing this research and the tools that make it easier. Speaking of tools, a nice feature of the SEO Toolbar is the keyword suggest tool. Type in a keyword, select the tools you want to use and get suggestions for other keywords.

Step 2 – Search Engine Visibility

There are two areas of search engine visibility:

• Where your website ranks for your top keywords
• How visible your business is in general (i.e. via social sites, directories and links to your properties).

To find out how well you rank for your top keywords, you can use the Rank Checker. Enter your domain name, your top keywords and hit start and it runs a report that says where your site ranks for those keywords in Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can save the report and run it regularly to track how well you are rising in the ranks.

To see how well your business is listed in various online directories, check out GetListed.org. They check Google, Yahoo, Bing, Best of the Web and now Yelp and HotFrog for your listing. If your business is not listed in any of these directories, you have work to do. Creating your local business listings has two benefits:

• It makes your business more visible throughout the social web;
• It creates more links back to your website.

Step 3 – Website Structure Analysis

How your website is structured has a lot to do with how well you will be indexed in the search engines and how readily you will be found. This may be something you will need help with, but if your site is created in WordPress, which naturally embraces search engines, you will be in good shape. If not, make sure your site isn’t loaded with JavaScript, Flash and other items search engines can’t index and that you follow the usual on page SEO techniques to help search engines better index your site.

Step 4 – Social Media Analysis

Analyzing your presence on the social media sites for this exercise is about brand consistency, message communication and participation across all the sites. Take a hard look at your profiles and make sure you are sending the same message to the same audience for all of them and that you are linking all your profiles and website for maximum visibility.

Step 5 – Competitive understanding

Now that you know how you are seen online, compare your results with that of your competition. Understanding where you are stronger or weaker in relation to their presence will help you determine where you should be channeling your marketing efforts. The SEO toolbar can be used quite effectively to gather that information.

• Visit the site and look at the information the SEO toolbar provides;
• Run Rank Checker for the same keywords to see where they rank;
• Use the “compare sites” feature on the SEO toolbar to get more statistics.

In addition, review their website and social media profiles for their messages, brand consistency and keyword usage.

How visible are you?

If you have never monitored your presence on the Internet to see how well your marketing activities are working, you should do one now to set a baseline for measuring your improvement over the next few months. As you increase your visibility, great things can happen for your business.

What have I missed? Is there something else we should include in this analysis? Add your ideas to the comments. And let us know how well you are doing.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

5 Steps to Analyzing Your Web Presence for Better Online Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

1. Create a vision and set realistic goals for your business. What’s that have to do with marketing, you ask? Knowing your vision will help you make decisions on what types of activities you will need to get where you’d like to go. Goals break the process into smaller pieces to allow you to get there one step at a time. Without a vision and a set of goals, you may make some decisions that lead you nowhere.
2. Know what makes you different and make sure you are able to communicate it clearly. Most of the time, it’s not something complicated. In fact, many of us overlook our key strength because it seems too simple to us. Once you identify what it is, clearly communicate why this is of value to your ideal client. Stay focused and develop your expert reputation around this unique skill.
3. Understand your ideal client intimately and know what keeps them awake at night. If you know your ideal client well, you will be able to create the content they need and the services that will attract them to you. This knowledge will also help you avoid tactics that won’t work, wasting time and money with little to no return.
4. Develop your list of keywords and use them strategically throughout all of your online properties. Knowing how people search for what you have to offer is critical to your online visibility. Do your research and make it a habit to use these phrases throughout all of your online profiles to help the search engines index your material more effectively.
5. Create a top notch WordPress website for your business. As the center of your online presence, your website/blog is the most important marketing tool you have. Don’t risk your image with a website that is poorly developed and hard to maintain. A WordPress website enables you to easily add new, relevant content that your audience needs.
6. Be generous with your knowledge. Give away valuable content that will attract prospects to you. Write an ebook, develop a white paper or write in your blog regularly. This content demonstrates your capabilities, builds your reputation as an expert and will help people decide whether you can help them solve their challenges.
7. Be consistent with your brand. Think through what you want all of your web properties to look like before you create them. Start with your Website and then develop your Facebook Business Page with the same look. Create a consistent Twitter background and don’t forget to brand your email newsletter. Try to create a user name that you can use across all social media sites that is relevant to your business.
8. Create a complete local business listing in all the search engines. Add images, a keyword rich profile and point it back to your website or blog. Get happy clients to write reviews as these can be incorporated into the listing. For your Google Local Business Listing, reviews are also compiled from third-party websites. All businesses should create free listings in these local business directories to help increase traffic to your website. There are many others that can be beneficial but start here and add new ones as appropriate.
   • Google Local Business Center
   • Bing Local Business Listing
   • Yahoo! Local
9. Get involved with social media. Start with a blog and post regularly based on what makes sense for you. Then incorporate other social media activities that make sense for your business. If you target market is not on Facebook, don’t immediately set up a Facebook Page. If you want to reach the CFOs of major companies, set up a rich profile on LinkedIn. You can determine what sites will be best for your business based on mastering tip number 3.
10. Don’t be afraid of online marketing. Although it seems overwhelming at times, online marketing is a process that can be planned, tracked and measured. Create a realistic plan (and get help doing so if you need to), put activities into motion and track them to see how they work. Don’t let fear paralyze you from taking action because doing nothing is riskier than doing something not quite right.

Final piece of advice: Take a little time to learn enough about online marketing so you can tell when someone is claiming they can do something that they cannot. Seek help and guidance from someone who can walk you through the steps. However, beware of those who claim to be online experts because they know how to use Facebook or Twitter. Find a true marketing resource with years of marketing experience who is willing to connect what these tools do with how to use them for marketing.

Share your small business online marketing tips. We can all use more inspiration.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

10 Marketing Tips for Gaining Online Visibility is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

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.

What can you do with this information?

Review the results for the top keywords to see how and why visitors are coming to your site. Make sure your site is being found for keywords associated with your business. Then find your top keywords using the search feature and review how they are working. Look at your position in the search results. If you see “3rd page +”, your site needs work for that keyword. Now use this information to:

• Determine how to get better ranking for your important keywords.
• Review your SEO for each page of your website to ensure you are including the right keywords on each page in the right places.
• Review your blog posts to ensure you include the appropriate tags and get into the habit of creating tags for your posts on a regular basis.
• Develop a content strategy to help you gain more visibility for your more important keywords.

Don’t forget to use the Google AdWords External Keyword Tool to get the search volume for keywords it determines from your website.

Let’s just say I learned a lot about my own website ranking and which keywords need some work while I was reviewing the changes to help you take advantage of this information. Now it’s time for you to do the same. What does your Tops Search Queries report tell you?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Top Search Queries: Data to Help You Know How to Get Found is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

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.

10 On Page SEO Tips

1. Write quality body copy using variations on your main keyword phrase. Each page of your website should talk about a specific topic, which naturally optimizes the page. Use the most important keywords pertaining to that page early (within the first 50 – 100 words). Emphasizing phrases of your copy using italics or bold to make it stand out for the reader can have an additional benefit if the emphasis is on a phrase that contains your keywords.
2. Use heading tags (H1 through H6) strategically on your page. Search engines give headings more weight than regular body copy, therefore you should spend time writing great headings with appropriate keywords. A good example is the heading above “10 On Page SEO Tips” that uses a H2 (heading 2) tag. Although studies have shown that the heading tags have no SEO value, have your Web developer style these tags for your site and use them instead of trying to style the fonts manually. This will make your copy more interesting to your readers, even if the heading tags have little SEO value.
3. Use keywords as anchor text when linking internally. If you are offering a great ebook on the “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries”, use keywords in the text that links to the document rather than generic words such as “click here”. For example, use: Download your copy of “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries“, with the title linked to the actual file.
4. Write a descriptive alt attribute on the image tag for all images using the top keyword phrase for that page. Keyword rich Alt tags help your page get better rankings. Using the keyword phrase as the file name of the image also helps with traffic to your website.
5. Create unique page titles using relevant keywords. The page title is the most important on-page SEO element. Unlike humans that think of your Website as one entity, search engines ranks each page independently. If you are using the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, create different page titles for each page of your site using one or two keyword phrases that describe the content that not only is interesting to the human visitor but tells the search engine robots what the page is all about for proper indexing. Preferably, put the most relevant keyword first in the title. Don’t leave the page title with the default “Page Name | Blog Title”.
6. Get a domain name that contains your main keyword. If you already have a domain name for your business, this may be more difficult but if you are starting fresh, spend some time trying out different domains to get one that helps your ranking. A useful website for researching domain names is Domainsbot. Type in words and it spins out potential domain names.
7. Use “pretty permalinks”. WordPress handles the page and post naming based on the title you give it so think about what you want to call the page that gets you the most benefits. Having a Services page is nice, but having a Services page that is displayed in the navigation as “Personal Training Services” is better.
8. Control the content that shows up in the search engine results. Writing quality descriptions for each page increases click-through rates from the search engine results pages to your website. So although search engines don’t use the meta description tag directly, when your site does appear in the results, give the reader a reason to visit your site.
9. Create an XML Sitemap and upload it to the search engines. An XML Sitemap tells the search engines where to look for all of your content and ensure that pages on the site get indexed in the search engine’s directory. This is especially important on websites where content changes frequently (i.e. your Blog) or have a large number of pages. To easily create one on your WordPress website, use the Google Sitemap Generator plugin that does all the work for you including notifying the search engines that there is new content.
10. Keep your site structure simple. I usually recommend that your website go no deeper than 3 levels away from the home page in the site navigation. If humans can’t find your content, neither will the search engine robots. Important content should be close to the home page for not only the search engines but also to make it easy for people you are trying to create a relationship with to find.

For those of you who want more education on how to  build the perfectly optimized page, read the post on SEOmoz titled Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.

Search engine marketing starts with a website that has implemented the basics of search engine optimization. Nothing feels better than having your phone ring and a prospect is calling you because they found you on the Internet. It’s even nicer when they found you in the organic search engine results, regardless of which search engine they use. Strive to do the basics.

Have you implemented basic SEO on your Web site?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

“Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

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.

Take Ownership for Your Online Marketing Success

The following will help you get the most out of your online marketing effort.

Do:

• Remember that search engine optimization, pay-per-click campaigns and social media activities are all marketing activities. If you are looking for someone to help you, make sure these people understand basic marketing principals. The technology is a tool – the means to an end – not the end itself. Those who spew technical jargon to confuse you should be suspect.
• Find someone with whom you can develop a long term relationship. This doesn’t mean hiring a consultant on a retainer, but it does mean having someone you can call and pay to help you when you need it.
• Understand that search engine marketing requires a long-term commitment by you to make it work for you. Your site will get better rankings in search engines if you write content regularly, keep your social media outposts updated and active and you monitor your progress and understand what works and what does not.

Don’t:

• Hire a company that requires they take over your website, makes a copy of your website, replaces your phone number with theirs (to track phone calls as well as clicks) or transfers your domain to their control! Your domain name, website and content are assets of your company and you need to remain in control of your assets and your brand.
• Respond to emails that say they can optimize your site and guarantee that they can get your site on the first page of Google. If you notice, all the emails say the same thing exactly – they just get sent from different fake email accounts. These hopefully go into your SPAM folder and should stay there.
• Believe any sales call that claims that their SEO software can get your site top rankings ever will. Although it may work for some small businesses depending on where they are located and how competitive their industry is, most small businesses in and around major cities or in very competitive fields (like plumbing, remodeling or roofing) will never achieve their claimed results. Find someone who can help you with your overall marketing effort to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Matt McGee wrote a very good article on How to Get Started with SEO that can provide a starting point for those  interested in learning more. And although most small businesses may not need the $500 – $1000 per hour SEO consultant, you should plan to invest in someone who can help you do it right. At this point there are too many horror stories of small businesses being scammed out of a lot of money, time and visibility on the Web to not take this seriously.

What do you think? Can SEO and PPC be automated with software and become a commodity?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

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.

Taking Care of Your Online Marketing

Before you rush into implementing a pay-per-click advertising campaign on any of the search engines, you want to make sure your website is optimized first. I just recently wrote a post on Five Easy Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Website so make sure you’ve implemented those tips and let your website get indexed by all three search engines.

Next, you want to set up your local listings in all three search engines local business centers. To make this effort easier, create a profile that contains the following information: name, address, phone numbers (office and mobile if you want folks to know it), web site address, contact email, hours of operation if relevant, payment methods, description of your business, products, services, brands and specialties, certifications, company logo, and a half dozen photos of your work if relevant. Put the content in a document where you can cut and paste it as necessary and have your images available for uploading. Then create your local business listing in Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Best of the Web. Here are the links to all three:

• Bing Local Listing Center - Log in with a Windows Live ID to create your listing.
• Yahoo! Local Listing – Log in with your Yahoo! ID to create your free listing. Yahoo! also offers enhanced and featured listings, but wait to sign up for those until you get all your free listings established.
• Google Local Business Center – Log in with your Google account to create your free listing. Google provides a dashboard that enables you to manage your listing. It gives you simple analytic data about activity and search queries used when people saw your listing. They also enable you to offer coupons with your business listing and post a message to your place page.
• Best of the Web – Create an account and submit your free listing.

I usually like to get the above done and let the search engines “do their thing” with indexing your site. Give them time to position your site for your major keywords. Then, if you still are looking for more traffic to your website, now consider creating a pay-per-click campaign. Google, Yahoo and Bing all have pay-per-click advertising that enable you to set up your campaign, manage your daily budget and monitor its progress. Setting up your campaign is simple in all cases. I usually recommend that small businesses start with a low budget and watch how the campaign sets itself up by monitoring your analytics information. You can see where your traffic is coming from, how the search engines are delivering visitors to you, which sites are referral sites and how many people come to your site directly.

In many cases, small business owners don’t really want to do this themselves. But if someone calls you with something that sounds too good to be true, most likely it is. Before you spend your money on these types of services, buyer beware – do your homework. Search the web for these businesses, looking for reviews by other small business owners before you give them your money. Better yet, consult with someone you trust to work with you on your online marketing efforts. You won’t be sorry.

Have you received these types of sales calls? How did you handle them?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Why You Should Control Your Online Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.