Oct
4
2009
Many businesses are holding back on using social media because it seems time consuming, and even more of a deterrent, useless. While it’s true that soial media can be a time vacuum, there are strategies for maximizing efforts in less than an hour a day. Social media is only a useless marketing strategy when it’s done incorrectly. Here the top three reasons why social media should be part of every business marketing plan.
1. Build Your Internet Presence: Social media profiles are showing up on the FIRST page of Google! Many companies don’t have their websites listed on the first, second, or even fifth page of Google due to a non-existant search engine optimization strategy. The advantages of being on the first page of Google can be further maximized by utilizing competitive keywords on profiles.
2. Establish Yourself as an Expert: People are much more likely to believe and respect what is written. By using social media, article directories, blogging posts, and video, there is an opportunity to establish credibility and positioned as a thought leader. By interacting with others and answering questions, offering helpful resources and advice, respectibility is created. This can be leveraged to increase traffic to websites, capture pages, blog posts, etc.
3. Increase Google rank: Social media websites have incredible “Google juice” which can improve a website’s performance in the search engines. Backlinks are an integral part of a successful search engine optimization campaign, and the most powerful backlinks are those from highly ranked websites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. By not having a profile on these websites, you are leaving a lot of valuable Google juice on the table.
Oct
1
2009
Benefit One – High ROI
Dollar for dollar, SEO brings you a higher Return On your Investment than any comparable form of marketing.
Benefit Two – Positioning
Once in place, a properly designed and optimized site should stay in the rankings compared to PPC where costs and outlay are ongoing and unpredictable.
Benefit Three – Targeted Traffic
SEO can increase the number of visitors who are actively searching for your service or product.
Benefit Four – Promotion that Doesn’t Sleep
Imagine having your own marketing and promotions company working exclusively just for you! One that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days every year. That’s the benefit of SEO!
Benefit Five – Increase Brand Visibility
SEO can give your brand a high international profile – and for a comparatively low outlay.
Benefit Six – Higher Sales
SEO can mean increased sales of your product or service.
Benefit Seven – Usability
Observing basic optimization guidelines should mean that visitors have a more pleasant user experience.
Benefit Eight – Increased Accessibility
Observing sensible optimization procedures can make your site more accessible to all users.
Benefit Nine – Faster Loading Pages
Properly validated and optimized files will be smaller, meaning less server requests and quicker download times.
Benefit Ten – Navigable by the Engines
All links should function correctly and all pages should be accessible to the engines, thus making your site easy for the engines to index and properly categorize.
Sep
28
2009
One of the first steps of an online presence is purchasing a domain name. There are a few ideas on choosing the appropriate domain name for your business.
Keep it simple. If you can find your business name, perfect. If your business name is Christopher’s Fishing Extravaganza, that’s a bit too long and potential customers will have a hard time spelling extravaganza (I actually had to use spell check). You should certainly purchase that domain and have your webmaster point it to a shorter domain name. Try to find an appealing shorter variation of your business name that describes what you do or sell. You could register fishingshow.com or fishing-show.com. The shorter a domain name is the more probable users are to remember it and the less complicated it will be for users to type it correctly.
Registering a domain that describes what your company does can also increase your opportunities of getting indexed by search engines, which may result in additional traffic to your website. It is important to have a domain name that can summarize the content of your website accurately. If your domain name has an excessive amount of numbers or is seen as too long, then it is not helping you gain traffic to your website. It may even be a deciding factor for the public to pick a competitors website over yours. A domain name is basically an advertisement for your website and if you have an effective and accurate one, then people will notice and it will have a tremendous impact on the amount of traffic you will receive. A domain name is another simple way to have your website not only recognized by the public, but also by search engines.
Another useful tip is to research the domain name for history. It is possible that someone else previously owned a domain that you are interested in. It is important to find out why they are not using that domain name anymore and make sure they did not encounter any problems with it, before preceding to use it yourself. You could have the perfect domain name picked out, but if it is already registered by someone else and/or has been used before, you will need to make some necessary changes. Check to see if there are any pages currently indexed, or if there are any negative affiliations or negative back links that could potentially harm your chances of being indexed on some of the major search engines, such as, Google, MSN and Yahoo!.
When purchasing a domain name, act as though you were attempting to purchase a business. Spend some extra time and put some extra thought into it because, as we previously discussed, a domain name will summarize your business and can be a very effective marketing tool. You want to make sure you are spending your time and investing your money into purchasing a domain name since it will be a factor in determining the success of your business. It is critical to determine if there are any potential issues that could cost you time or money before you make this investment. There are professional consultants out there that can help you with this important decision by making sure you aware of your available options and selecting the best choice.
Selecting the proper top-level domain (TLD) is an important point in defining your business online (.com, .net, .org, .info, and so on). If your company is in the United States then you want to purchase a .com as your domain because your competitors will (in most cases) be using .com as their TLD and you need stay at or reach for their competitive level. The public recognizes .com as a more common TLD, which means it would be more natural for you and the public to see a .com as your domain name as opposed to .org, which could confuse them and deter them from visiting your website. While on that point, there isn’t anything incorrect with .net and .org domains. However, the .org domain is still perceived as nonprofit as they were originally intended to be used for, and .net domains were originally associated with online services websites. While these two domain types aren’t as familiar to most internet users, they could work out in your favor in some instances. Something else to consider about top-level domainssuch as .biz and .info is that they are frequently associated with spammers.
Ultimately, choosing the perfect domain name isn’t hard, it may take a little brainstorming but if you remember these few key points, you will be on the right track!
Sep
27
2009
For many business people, their business website serves as a way to capture leads and increase business. The only way for this to happen is to actively find ways to entice people into checking out what you have to offer. To drive more traffic to your website, try these proven methods to increase the number of visitors to your site.
1. Promote your site: List your website on all of your marketing materials which include business cards, letterhead, brochures, flyers, office signage, voicemail greetings, newsletters, etc. Also list it in the signature line of your email. The signature line is prime real estate, consider how many emails you send every month?
2. Keyword Programming: Be sure to have your website optimized for keywords that prospective clients would use in a search engine to find your type of business. Your website should contain these keywords in the content, and also in the meta~tags, page titles, etc.
3. Visit Blogs: Read blogs on a regular basis which are similar in subject matter to the services and products your company provides. Leave interesting comments, helpful advice and tips, and include your url and name.
4. Social Media: Be sure to have links to your website in your social media profiles. Having an enticing offer such as a free giveaway will encourage people to check out what you have to offer.
5. Update your website: Adding fresh information to your website should be done on a regular basis to encourage visitors to check back. A stagnant site will do little to entice visitors to check back. Keep the blog current, add upcoming events, and swap out the give aways.
Sep
25
2009
The search engine spider or bot only has one job, and that is to crawl the content of a website and to retrieve information.
A spider (also known as a web crawler, web robot or web scutter) is a type of program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical manner. Search engines use spidering to get up-to-date data. Spiders can’t think. They act. Not on intelligence, but on what they are programmed to do, which is to crawl and retrieve. They aren’t that smart. Spidering is used to create a copy of visited pages that are downloaded into an index to provide fast searches.
Spiders check links/validate html codes and also gather specific information from web pages such as email addresses. Spiders are important because they can help with determining your website ranking on search engines. If a spider detects certain aspects of your website that are considered bad, such as not enough quality links to other pages, broken links or not enough keyword phrases, this can cause your page ranking to be very low. While they do not figure out your page rank, they do report their findings and that in turn is when problems may occur.
Search Engine Spiders are basic. They crawl the same as they always have. Some may be a little more advanced than others, some crawl more intricately than others, but they all do the same job. They take the information back to the main search engine and report what they found.
If you have the same content on your website, a spider is likely to come back less and less often. A great way to keep spiders coming back consistently is to add fresh content to your website. Adding new content, articles, pages and updates keeps your website fresh, continues to keep the spiders coming back. And in the end, providing good quality “spider food” for those hungry little spiders is a great way to get your website to rank higher in the search engines.
Sep
24
2009
This is a list to help you along the Tweet craze.
Did you know that Twitter was designed at a short message service(SMS)?
- Twitter is limited tweets to 140 characters.
- You can use Twitter with your cell phone.
a. Login at twitter.com and click Settings, then go to Devices and add your phone.
b. You can tweet from your phone by texting a message to 40404.
c. You can also text commands to Twitter, like “help” or more important, “off.” - You can install Twitter with Facebook.
a. Click the button at the bottom of the page that says “Install Twitter in Facebook.” You’ll then have to click through a few pages of configuration.
b. Remember – only 140 characters are shown… - Do you like a specific Tweet?
a. If you like a tweet and want to save it forever, mouse over it. A star-shaped icon appears at the right of the text. Click that.
b. Then, you can click the Favorites link on your home page to see all the tweets the stars you’ve clicked.
c. You can also go to other users’ pages and browse through their Favorites. (Sneeky, Sneeky) - Desktop Apps – Just like I.M. (Instant Messenger)
a. Windows machines – (I’m a PC:):
i. Digsby is an application that displays Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all of your e-mail accounts in a stretched out, large window that looks like a easy to use I.M..
b. Mac Users – Smug ones aren’t you!
i. Try Twitterrific, which has been commended for a visual that looks a lot like Apple’s shiny little photo editor. - TweetDeck – Mac & PC? (I won’t tell anyone)
a. This one covers your screen and it runs on both PCs and Macs – (imagine that!)
i. TweetDeck breaks out multiple columns for different kinds of tweets and different groups of friends. It has loads of extra features, too, like photo uploads to TwitPic, a Facebook tie-in and a ticker of a supply of tweets. - Twitter Apps for Smart Phones (PDA’s, iPhones, and Androids.)
a. These Apps make it easy as pie to post photos from your phone’s camera to TwitPic.
i. TwitterBerry for BlackBerry
ii. Tweetie for iPhones
iii. Twidroid for G1 Android - Voice Recognition??
a. Check this out!
i. TweetCall is a recently introduced voice-recognition system that takes calls to 1-877-TWEETCALL from your phone, translates your words to text, then tweets the result through your account.
ii. There hasn’t been cure for all the pesky bugs yet…. - Tweeting at the Office? (Naughty…)
a. Outlook
i. OutTwit is a more basic app that adds Twitter assistance into Microsoft Outlook. You can send and read tweets from inside Outlook.
b. Excel
i. Spreadtweet is a mischievous (bad kitty) desktop app that mimics a boring Excel spreadsheet. Coworkers who don’t look too closely won’t realize your spreadsheet’s rows are actually tweets. And if they are – tell ‘em to back off! - Addicted Yet??
a. TweetBeep.com will search Twitter once an hour and send you an e-mail if it finds, say, the name of your company or the latest batch of #bradpitt tweets. TweetBeep saves you from spending your day hovering over the Advanced Search page.