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By Michael Jillions in SE Tactics

There is a common misconception that a website automatically catapults a business to global stardom. This could be true - with a lot of time and money spent on it - but in isolation, a website is next to useless. No doubt all you SEO experts out there will think I’m teaching grandma to suck eggs but there are literally thousands of people starting out who just don’t realise what it takes.

The truth is, a website on its own is akin to opening a new shop at the bottom of a dark, gated alleyway - with no signage or advertising. Passers-by will do exactly that, pass by, never knowing what wonderful products you are selling. Without the brightly lit signs, local press, opening launches, special offer flyers and other advertising, nobody will ever know your shop is there!

It’s the same with a website, unless people know it’s there, they will never visit it.

So what does it take to get noticed?

Well, for a start, you should register your URL as early as you possibly can. Put up a page stating “website under construction”. Google rates websites, amongst other criteria, for how long they have been up and running. A new website will take many months before Google’s bots will start giving your site any credence.

Next, when you build your site you need to ensure it is built to be optimised for search engine spiders. There is a lot of information out there about how to do this but unless you are a web developer my advice would be to find a reputable company to do it for you. You get what you pay for. In my experience, a cheap website will end up costing you more in the long run. Better to employ a company with a proven track record than to to spend months messing around with a sub-standard site.

Then you will need to be constantly updating your site with fresh content so the spiders know you are a live business and so that your readers or customers have something to keep them coming back .

Establish links to your website from other sites that are high page-ranked. There are a number of ways to do this.

  1. You can email the webmaster and offer to provide reciprocal links or manually enter your website details into the many thousands of directories or you can purchase software to part-automate the process. Again, this process takes a lot of time and effort and tests the greatest of patience.
  2. Write articles and post them to the big article directories. If readers like your article they can publish them as content on their site, which then provides a link to your site.
  3. Participate in forums, using your expertise, use blogs and social networking sites to get your url out there as much as possible.

Okay so all this takes time. What about getting business in the meantime?

Well this is where we come to sponsored links. Sponsored links can give you the immediate exposure that you need. This is where you and your competitors essentially bid to be seen on the right hand side of Google’s Results Page. I read all sorts of articles about the pros and cons of using this facility and I get the feeling that the overall message is a negative one, that somehow paying to be at the top of the listings is cheating. Well I don’t subscribe to this. The organic listings have created a situation that is very similar to the rise of the supermarkets and decline of the greengrocer and butcher and fishmonger. It is hard to compete with their buying power.

This is not so different. To get a good flow of visitors on your site you need to be on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords. To be on the first page is not easy, as I said before it takes a lot of time, effort and money to get there and stay there. Most small businesses, particularly those who are just starting out, don’t have the time, money or know how to do this. But they may well be offering a really good service, product or whatever. It isn’t cheating; it is just a way of getting noticed by your target audience while you gradually develop your SEO skills.

Michael Jillions is a Director at Mill House Data Solutions Ltd, specialists in the design of professional grade, bespoke database applications.
http://www.millhousedata.com\

By Nelson Tan in SE Tactics

Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination—your website—you need to provide them with effective signs that direct them right to your site by creating carefully chosen keywords.

Think of the right keywords as the “Open Sesame!” of the Internet. Find the exactly right words, and presto! Hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or overused, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site—or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive—decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words, consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase.

Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties.

You want to find people who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to your site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work—and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

By Willie Crawford in SE Tactics

To many online marketers, getting a #1 listing on Google for your target keyword phrases is “heaven.” It does lead to many times more traffic than being even #2 or #3. If you’re not on the first page of Google, you may as well forget getting any significant traffic in many niches. At least you should plan on generating your traffic via other channels since few searchers look past the first page of search engine results.

Google the terms “joint venture expert” or “land for $100″ and you’ll see that I rank #1 for both terms and have for a VERY long time.

Yes, people do search on those terms, regardless of what you might think, and they both generate substantial incomes for me, but they are not my most profitable keywords. They are just keywords that I will use to prove to you that I have a clue about how to get top Google listings. You really shouldn’t listen to “experts” who can’t back up with they teach with proof.

Next, I invite you to try to reverse engineer what I did. Actually, I’ll share much of my secret process with you. Not all of what I do is very obvious.

Here are the things that I do:

1) I target specific, long-tail, buying keywords. It’s easier to rank for 3-5 word phrases, and people entering those phrases into the search engines are looking for something very specific. This is the traffic that you want to attract.

2) I use article marketing extensively to generate massive backlinks. All things being equal, the one with the most backlinks from relevant quality sites WINS.

3) I use video marketing, submitting to top video sharing sites using titles and descriptions optimized for my keywords.

4) I use pod casting, submitting my audios to numerous podcast directories, as well as offering them from numerous websites. People who hear your audio message, and click through to your site, arrive pre-sold on your and ready to follow your recommendations.

My pod cast submissions are also keyword optimized!

5) I use my keywords in anchor text on my blogs, and in article directories where allowed.

6) I generate a LOT of content, and repurpose that content regularly. I publicize that content on social networking sites, on other resource sites that allow me to publicize my content, and even in press releases.

For example, I post announcements of my updated content often to IMNewsWatch.com, TeleseminarNation.com and leading industry forums.

7) I use automation. If I had to hand submit all of my content I would only be able to distribute 1/10th as much. All things being equal, he who submits the most quality content wins.

8) I adhere to the rules and terms of service at the article, video, podcasts, and press release sharing sites. It does no good to get great rankings, only to be banned a few weeks or months later (having all of your content removed, and your work go to waste). I use 100% whitehat tactics.

9) I generate quality content. I does no good to throw garbage at the search engines. You’ll only attract non-responsive traffic (wasting bandwidth and giving you useless website traffic conversion statistics), and you’ll also eventually experience backlash. Write primarily for humans, but keeping good SEO in mind. The simplest way to do that is to use your primary keywords in your titles and descriptions, when creating and uploading content. Also be sure to use your primary keywords throughout your content.

10) I create external links to some of my content posted on sites OTHER THAN my primary sites. Linking to content that then links to your primary sites increases the relevance of external links from that content pointing to your primary sites. That helps the content on your primary sites rank higher longer. SEO experts call that “adding link juice!” If you don’t do this, you’ll often rank high for given keywords only for a few days, and then quickly drop in ranking. Adding “link juice” helps the ranking “stick.”

There you have it - how I get and maintain #1 Google rankings for tons of keywords that my buying customers search on regularly at Google. Model what I do, and you’ll get similar results.

Willie Crawford has been teaching people to build a legitimate online business since 1996. He is one of the world’s leading website traffic generation experts. His favorite tool is an automated article, video, podcast and press release submission service that you can use too at: http://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com Visit them now.

By Enzo F. Cesario in SE Tactics

online marketing, internet marketing, branding, online branding, brand, brand name, defining your market, defining your brand, online resources, online business, The term “brand” has been around for many years and can be used to refer to a company name, a product name, an advertising campaign or a logo. Branding is used to create an emotional attachment to a product or company. It can also create a sense of perceived higher quality or value.

In internet marketing, branding is more than logos and theme songs. Branding lets customers know who you are, what you do and how you do it. It’s your promise of value. Effective branding will increase your potential customer base and more potential customers will always equal more sales opportunities.

In recent years, consumers have been spending more time and money on the internet. In addition to communicating with friends, they’re comparison shopping and making more and more purchases online. It’s imperative for a business to use the internet to make an impact.

Here are a few ways to define your online identity:

Describe Your Brand First - Start With What You Do

When they land on your website, your visitors should know immediately what your company does and how it can help them. Don’t be ambiguous and don’t try to be too cute. Build a unique shopping experience that a visitor will remember. With regard to graphics on your website, remember that images can convey more than words, and good ones can play a major part in online branding.

Find Your Target Market

The focus of a marketing campaign is people. Your goal is to reach a subset of the population who might be interested in your particular product - your target market.

The more you know about your target market, the more precisely you can develop a marketing strategy. Your branding efforts should focus on that target market. Your message should be clear and should appeal to your visitor and make them realize the benefits of visiting your website, your store and ultimately buying your products or services.

Humanize Your Website

What is your company’s personality? The online world can be a cold and daunting place. Your branding efforts can be much more effective when you add a human element to your website. Brands are like people in that a strong one has personality, expresses opinions and elicits feelings. Your website and brand could and should do the same thing.

If you are the sole owner, put your name and photo on your site to take away the mystery and distrust of a cold, impersonal website. Take a good look at your site. Does your design scheme complement your identity? You should be working toward your site having its own identity, unique language and clear personality.

Take a look at some of the sites you enjoy visiting and see what makes them special and satisfying to you. Branding is not about making your site more corporate - it’s about making it personal so that visitors want to come back.

Be Consistent

For effective branding on the web, you should be consistent in terms of your approach, your message and your language throughout your visitors’ experience. Any gateway to your customers - website, blog, newsletter, emails - should have your consistent, unique personality.

Content, Content, Content

Just as location, location, location is crucial in real estate, having great content on your site is a major factor in getting customers to return. Useful, brand-related information coupled with your unique voice will help you gain fans and ultimately loyal customers.

With good content, your website becomes “sticky”, that is, it’s able to keep visitors on the site browsing and reading longer. When the content is what people are looking for, they are not only more likely to stay longer, they’ll bookmark your site and maybe recommend it to others. They will learn that you are a reputable source of information and eventually go to your site for purchases.

Your branding goal should be to provide rich information on your site to build an expert reputation that will be recognized by both customers and search engines.

Have an Online Presence Outside of Your Site

Post regularly to online forums where people who might be interested in your brand are gathering. Use your expertise in your field to offer intelligent and useful information and include a link to your website in your signature.

With good online content, you can satisfy people’s craving for suitable information and increase your linking strategy at the same time. For example, if you have a site that sells art and painting supplies, you could write a history article on Rembrandt to be published online. This page for history or art buffs will now link potential customers from your target market to your site, and will become part of your linking strategy.

On your website, offer a free newsletter or rss feed. This will allow you to build a database of potential customers who have gone out of their way to express interest in your brand. Your newsletter will then allow you to deliver your message to an interested audience with a controlled frequency that will further build your brand.

Customers are becoming savvy and more discriminating when it comes to online interactions, and retailers need to provide a consistent, positive marketing experience. Great websites put substance before flash and that’s what branding is all about - your promise of value.

About The Author:

Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat, the only online marketing and advertising company employing Brandcasting, the most effective way to brand your company on the web. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. The approach is simple, highly effective and affordable. Learn more at: http://www.Brandsplat.com/

By Lauren Hobson in SE Tactics

Most of us are well aware that the search engines frequently change their algorithms to improve search results for users (and foil spammers), which can make it challenging for small businesses just to keep up. But as web technology continues to evolve, it also creates new opportunities for small businesses to improve their SEO strategies and boost their rankings as well. Social media (sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Technorati, Digg, etc.) provide an excellent opportunity for small businesses to not only promote their products and services online, but also to gain significant ground in the search engine results.

One of the most critical components to getting top search engine rankings is the number of inbound links and link popularity a web site is able to build. Although there are several existing link building strategies available to small businesses (e.g., press releases, directory submissions, article syndication, etc.), social media can help create additional high-value, on-target inbound links that are essential to achieving top placements in the search engines.

For example, each time you use Twitter to publish a link to new content on your web site, that link gets “planted” on the Twitter page of each person following you, and has the potential to spread even further as your followers share that information with their own network of contacts.

Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)TM
If you have properly integrated your social networking profiles together, that same Twitter “tweet” could then be fed via RSS to your Facebook business profile, your corporate blog, your LinkedIn account, and any number of other social sites that you have set up for your business. It’s not a far stretch to imagine the link you broadcast on Twitter could reach dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other places on the web, all pointing back to your web site!   By integrating your social networking profiles with each other, with your web site, and with your existing marketing initiatives, you can easily make one single marketing action (such as a tweet) show up in multiple places online, each containing a new, relevant inbound link to your site.

Quantity AND Quality
In addition to the sheer number of inbound links that are created through social marketing, the value of the links that are created is another important criterion that search engines consider. To be valued by the search engines, inbound links must be from relevant, “quality” web sites, and search engines today give social sites like Facebook and Twitter great value. These sites are highly visible to the search engines, and are constantly taking updates from users. Links tend to be shared according to subject matter, which means the search engines will see them as being relevant and on-target. All of these factors combine to create high-quality inbound links in the eyes of the search engines.

Online Visibility and Branding
Creating visibility for your business and your “brand” is really key when using social media for building links. The power of social media is realized when other users see your links or content, then share that information with their own network of contacts. Simply adding a bunch of links to your social profiles is not enough; you need to have a strong reputation and a brand that users trust so they will feel comfortable sharing your content with others. Brand recognition typically leads to natural link building anyway, which means your inbound links will end up coming from bloggers, colleagues, customers, and other people who are exposed to your links and find them useful enough to share with their own contacts.

The Proof is in the Rankings
A recent example from Website Magazine explained somewhat surprising results when they searched for their publication’s name in Google. As expected, their web site came up as the number one listing on the results page. But what was not expected was the number three listing on the results page was the magazine’s Twitter page. They then performed a number of Google searches for the terms “Chicago Tribune,” “Chicago Public Golf,” and “Daily Career Tips,” all with similar results in Google - the Twitter page for each of these terms came up near the top of the search engine results every time.

The conclusion was that given these results, Google must be giving serious weight to Twitter content, and I happen to agree. The search engines of course keep their ranking algorithms top-secret, so there’s no way to know how much weight (if any) is really given to Twitter or other social media sites. But results like those in the example above are hard to ignore!

A Great Opportunity
Social media is here to stay, and small businesses are beginning to use it to effectively promote their businesses, reach their customers, find new leads, keep customer mindshare, and instantly communicate with customers. But maybe one of the biggest benefits of adding social media to your marketing mix is the creation of high-value, on-target inbound links that can help improve visibility in the search engines and boost your business to the top of the search engine rankings.

Lauren Hobson, President of Five Sparrows, LLC, has more than 16 years of experience in small business technology writing, marketing, and web site design and development. Five Sparrows provides professional web site and marketing services to small businesses and non-profit organizations, giving them access to high-quality services at affordable prices. To read articles or subscribe to Biz Talk, please visit www.FiveSparrows.com/biztalk.htm.

By Andrew Egorov in SE Tactics

So your website is up and running and the investment in time and money you’ve put into your PPC campaign is now paying off.

With the website tracking you have implemented, you have been able to fine-tune your campaign so that you now have a fairly good idea about who you’re marketing to, what they’re searching for and the highest converting and traffic keywords. You have also been able to slowly reduce your CPC (cost per click) down to a more reasonable level.

But like all good businesses, you are constantly looking for ways to improve on your ROI which in the world of internet marketing means higher click rates. You should also be fully aware that you need to know how to monetize the traffic you are generating from your website. Traffic means nothing if you’re not doing anything with it.

There are a multitude of free ways to improve your search engine ranking so that you’re on the first page (and hopefully first position) on your relevant keyword search results.

In this article I’m going to go through the main ways in which you can do this. The most common term used for this is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

A search engine’s primary purpose is to serve the user the closest match and most relevant information for any given keyword search. Search engines reward websites that have good quality, relevant information with high search rankings.

One of the ways that a search engine ranks a website is by the number of unique links the website has from other websites. From the search engine point of view, this is an indication that the website must have something of value to other websites.

There are some important key things you must always understand to have an effective SE marketing strategy.

1. Provide valuable, relevant content.

Don’t just fill your site with non-relevant garbage. All articles on your website should be relevant and consistent to what your website is about. Try to avoid using free article to pad out your website, as people will soon find out that the information is non-relevant and won’t bother visiting.

People need to be interested in the articles or else they won’t link to your website and you won’t build your rankings. This takes time…as I keep reiterating in my articles…”Rome wasn’t built in day.” Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with using free articles, but the least you can do is filter out any non-relevant stuff.

2. Try to add content to your website on a regular basis.

Don’t expect to be able to add 1000 articles to your website in one go and expect a 1st position ranking in Google overnight. To get a high ranking using these free techniques takes time. Try to think of your internet business as an organic thing like an oak seed. It might take a while before you see any results, but given a bit of time and attention, it will grow into something massive and long lasting.

Weblogging (or blogging) is probably the easiest way to add content regularly.

Specifically designed websites called weblogs or blogs allow for easy and regular posting of articles. Of the many blogging sites on the internet today, one of the most popular can be found at www.wordpress.com. In fact, this blog is being hosted by them.

When writing your articles, make sure the content is relevant to your website and make sure it will interest whoever is reading it. Make sure that the article has links back to your other websites, be they your personal website or your lead capture pages, so that you are encouraging people to click them and so build up your authority status and keep the search engines happy.

Remember, search engines sole purpose is to provide people with the best quality and most relevant information possible. If you are doing that, they will reward you with a higher search engine ranking.

3. Get your articles published by as many other websites as possible.

It is important to throw your net wide and get a large variety of different websites linking back to your websites. Use syndication sites, reprint rights, press releases and article distribution sites to get your articles published by other websites, so that you can steadily build up your search ranking.

How do you do this? In actual fact, this blog is a form of syndication. A popular method is to use RSS, which allows subscribers to be instantly notified of any new updates. You can also publish articles using article submission sites like www.ezinearticles.com or submityourarticle.com.

So how often should I publish an article or blog?

Well it’s really up to you, what your website is and what sort of ranking you want. Approximately 1-8 articles a month is optimal, but never more than this. Publishers soon get tired of numerous articles from the same author. The key is consistency. Submit an article a few times a month, every month, and you should see results in just a few months.

Because blogs and articles are a simple and effective way to get content out onto the internet, they can be misused and abused by people flooding blog sites with complete rubbish using automated scripts in an attempt to boost their search engine rankings. People want content that is interesting and relevant and will soon get bored and annoyed with sites that have obviously gone for the quick and dirty approach to providing relevant content.

Andrew is an Internet Entrepreneur and Mentor, with over 20 years experience in the IT industry. He is passionate about teaching people how to build and manage their own internet business and sharing his extensive expertise and knowledge of the Internet. His main business website is http://www.incomelifestylefreedom.com His personal website is http://www.andrewegorov.com Visit his websites for FREE information!

By Oliver Feakins in SE Tactics

It surprises me how many companies underestimate the marketing value of their website. In many cases, design and content development are left to the IT department with little to no input from the marketing channels other than logo and color scheme. The websites are put up too fast, without enough consideration of fundamental elements such as traffic sources, conversation to sales and design. A website represents the company behind it and the effectiveness of a website signals the quality one would receive from that company. It is important that business owners answer the following five questions before tackling a new website.

1. What is the website’s purpose or mission?

Sounds simple right? Defining your site’s purpose is the single most important step you should take prior to new website construction. For most, the purpose will be as simple as “produce quality leads for our sales teams” or “sell our products online”. Once the mission of your site is defined, incorporate that goal in every aspect of designing and developing your site. Ask yourself, “how does this feature help the website visitor complete the site’s mission?” It’s important not to lose focus and get caught up in ‘bling’ at the cost of realizing your mission.

2. What am I going to need in order to get this website launched?

  • Time

It’s important to have reasonable expectations of time lines. Most business owners budget enough time for the website to be presented in “rough draft” but forget that testing is an important part of the process. This can take much longer than anticipated. While your development team will provide their best estimation of the time it will take, as a rule of thumb, add 50% to the completion time a developer tells you to allow for anything unforeseen.

  • Cost

Cost is an important factor in the web developing process. Budget a little extra money over the agreed amount to allow for small enhancements to the project that were not originally specified. Unexpected enhancements costs are a really good reason to have a very detailed project description before you begin. It’s not uncommon for technology based projects to come in slightly over budget and by having extra money at your disposal, you’ll be able to keep the project moving forward.

  • Resources

Have all your resources, such as having an assistant to help with planning or a graphic designer to help incorporate your company’s brand into the site, on board prior to starting. You may also need to bring in outside help, like programmers, internet marketing companies, social media marketing agencies and copy writers. Budget these resources into the total cost of your project and include them in the initial planning since having a seasoned professional working with you from the start will pay huge dividends upon completion.

3. How will I bring qualified visitors to my site?

Surprisingly, most small businesses have a website just to have a website with no strategy or plan on how they are going to bring qualified visitors to the site. It’s like having a billboard in the middle of the Sahara Desert - pretty but not bringing in customers. If you cannot hire an internet marketing company, you should tap into the many online resources geared towards small business internet marketing. At a minimum, you should invest into a properly managed Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing Campaign. Unlike Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the effects of PPC are immediate and can be controlled. I would also recommend working with a SEO professional to lay down the groundwork that will rank you high on the search engines.

Remember offline marketing as well. Your website should be part of your brand - put it everywhere! It should be on all letterhead, business cards, company vehicles, print and TV advertisements. Holding a contest that directs people to your websites is a popular and effective way to acquire a large number of back links to your site, which helps with search engine rankings.

4. How will I track my website’s ROI or gauge effectiveness?

Once your site is up and running, you’ll need to know if your marketing efforts (both “on-site” and “off-site”) are working. Remember your site’s purpose or mission? That now becomes what is known as a “conversion”. A conversion is the action taken by a website visitor that fulfills the site’s purpose. In most cases, this is either entering a sales lead into your site or buying an item. Other conversions could be downloading an “e-book” or signing up for a newsletter. Whatever the conversion is, everything done both on and off the site must be to lead people towards that completing a conversion.

To track your website and marketing effectiveness you need a reliable analytics program installed on your site. I am a big fan of Google Analytics because it’s very user friendly, easy to setup and free! By defining the desired conversion in your analytics program (PPC accounts as well) you will see which marketing efforts produce the highest number of conversions. Keep in mind that you may have a scenario where you get reduced site traffic but more conversions - but this is a good thing! You should review your analytics each month to track if your marketing campaigns are increasing or decreasing your conversions. Internet marketing company can do this for you and suggest ways to increase your conversions

5. How will I use design and technology to enhance my website?

  • Design

Websites should be clean, clear and clutter free. Ensure your designers are familiar with your brand and how your company is graphically represented by giving the web designer a copy of your logo and any promotional material. The site must be developed around your existing brand not the brand designed to fit the website. If you are a new company, take the time to develop a rich corporate identity before having your website designed and developed.

  • Technology

I’ve found that a web developer’s choice of code is similar to a person’s choice of automobile - personal and really not making any difference in function. There are some cases when you will need something robust like a pickup truck or SUV but in most cases using a common form of programming like PHP HTML or ASP will still get you from A to B. As well, using a common programming language will ensure that you’ll be able to find programming help faster and less expensive than if you went with a lesser known language. Finally, try to keep away from Flash and JavaScript as they can hamper the crawling of search engines on your site.

As you can see, a clear and thought out action plan will greatly increase the effectiveness of your site. Don’t underestimate the power of a well designed, conversion optimized website since this can mean many dollars added to your bottom line. Good Luck!

About The Author:

Oliver Feakins is the President of the Internet Marketing and Social Media Company WebTalent SEO. Visit http://www.webtalentseo.com for more information or call 877-496-3327.

By Mike Tekula in SE Tactics

I started in SEO working for an agency that required an annual contract. Clients who wanted to hire them had to be prepared to pay in full upfront for 12 months of service.

That’s a heck of a commitment, isn’t it?

The worst part is that most of the time what the client was “buying” wasn’t clear.

Many of proposals read something like this:

“Acme SEO Consulting will optimize Client’s website for search engines using best practices and proprietary tools and techniques. Work may include the following:

  • Title tag optimization
  • Headline optimization
  • ALT text optimization
  • Keyword research
  • Keyword density improvements
  • Canonicalization corrections
  • Crawl testing
  • Robots.txt setup / maintenance
  • Broken link scans
  • Link building
  • Competitor research
  • Internal link optimization
  • PageRank sculpting
  • 301 redirects”

Whew, sounds pretty advanced, doesn’t it? For someone new to the world of SEO most of these deliverables may as well read, “Flux capacitor installation, GKC valve distribution correction, Removal of vermicious knids.”

The question most people are asking when they read a proposal like this: how do these things all add up to me getting a positive return on my investment?  How do they translate into more sales/leads/etc?

As an SEO I know that several of the bullet points above are often crucial optimization points. It’s my job to know which and when/where they’re required - and what the priority is to implement each one when it’s on the table.

There’s also a lot of muddy language in the example above that leaves the actual deliverables impossible to pin down. “Best practices,” “proprietary tools and techniques,” “work may include” - these are all nice ways of saying, “we’re not telling you exactly what we’re going to do.”

From an agency standpoint the argument is often, “well, if we give clients the detailed plan upfront won’t they just take the proposal straight to a low-cost competitor and get the same work for less?”

This is not a great attitude to take in approaching business relationships, is it?  ”Well, these people could be trying to screw us so let’s tell them nothing.”

It also misses an important point: Internet Marketing needs are different for every website.

Projects Must Be Tailored for Unique Needs

Believe me, it would be great if every client that picked up the phone and called us or contacted us through our website fit into a cookie-cutter mold for SEO and other Internet Marketing services. Everyone would get the same work at the same cost and, most importantly, they’d all see the same positive results.

Happy, prosperous clients = happy, prosperous agency

Unfortunately that’s just not how it works.

The truth is that your website and needs are unique.

  • You’re in a unique market with unique competitors
  • You’ve been in business for a unique amount of time
  • You’re offering is one-of-a-kind (hopefully)
  • Maybe you’ve got an in-house email list, maybe you don’t
  • Maybe you’ve got an extensive profile of inbound links, maybe not
  • Your website might need a design/usability overhaul, or it may be beautiful, usable and brand spanking new
  • You could be running pay-per-click campaigns
  • You might have a blog or articles on your website
  • You may have web analytics installed or not - and for how long?
  • Perhaps you have staff in-house who can handle website updates and creating new content - on the other hand, you might need to outsource these

Sure, many of the principles of SEO and Internet Marketing apply across all, or most, websites and markets. But with so many variables and unique characteristics the work (and budget) required to reach your goals are always particular.
It makes sense, then, that any Internet Marketing company, whether they’re proposing SEO, pay-per-click, email marketing, web design or all of the above, should customize their offering to the client’s needs, doesn’t it?

How to Know What You’re Getting Into

You can probably tell where this is going. Any project, whether it be SEO or another form of Internet Marketing, should have specific strategies, tactics and timelines geared for your particular situation.

If you’re looking to hire an agency, a project proposal should be a plan and not a reiteration of the agency’s selling points. The litmus test here: does the proposal focus on you and your needs, or does it reiterate why you’d want to hire the agency, some of their general methodology, their experience, etc. Sure, that stuff is important too, but a project proposal isn’t about the agency - it’s about the game plan and how it’s going to help you achieve your goals.

Some of the questions that should be on your mind when reviewing a project plan:

  • What are the goals of this project?
    • More search engine traffic / exposure?
    • More leads?
    • More sales?
    • Do these goals make sense for your business model?
  • How will the goals be achieved?
    • What strategy the agency is proposing?
    • What are the specific deliverables?
    • What is the timeline for those deliverables?
  • Why will this strategy work?
    • What is the logic behind the strategy?
    • Has this strategy worked before?

Without the answers to these questions, isn’t it tough to know 1) what you’re aiming for and 2) how you’ll get there?

Imagine evaluating a year-long SEO project six months in. How are you going to evaluate the work that’s been done so far? How are you going to tell whether things are going well or not? If the plan or proposal was vague and listed lots of “possible” tactics/deliverables and no real timeline or goals it’s going to be pretty tough, right?

The basic reason most SEO projects fail

The essential reason most SEO projects fail isn’t because the work being done is shoddy (or the agency is just not worth their salt). That might be the case, but more often the cause of failure is the lack of a specific goals, strategy and detailed tactics/deliverables.

You can’t call something a “success” until you define that term. Take pains to understand upfront what your goals are for a project - and when an agency provides a quote make sure they’re addressing your goals, detailing the specific methods of reaching them and explaining logically why it’s all going to work.

About the Author Mike Tekula is the Director of Marketing at Unstuck Digital - a results-driven Internet Marketing agency that provides SEO Consulting, SEO Training and other Internet Marketing services.

By Leona Griffin in SE Tactics

While we all work to beat the competitors for targeted search terms, hoping to land that top ten ranking; Google’s Universal search provides additional opportunities to increase your website’s exposure by mixing in universal search results.

Most companies are not taking full advantage of universal search and are really missing the opportunity to increase their exposure and interact with their visitors in a new exciting way. We’ll show you how you can utilize Universal Search to push your website to the top of the search results and drive more traffic to your website with this exciting addition to Google Search.

Introduction to Google’s Universal Search

While Google offers up the paid search results via Google Adwords and organic search results within the center of their search results page; they are now mixing in other types of results in attempt to give visitors a taste of everything that is related to their search. This includes:

Benefits of Universal Search

For visitors, the benefits of universal search are that they can see various types of results without having to leave the organic search results page. Another benefit is that it breaks up the page adding images, video still shots and information in a way that is appealing.

For site owners, there are quite a few benefits. First, there are now multiple ways to have your products and services listed on the 1st or 2nd page of Google.

Second, if visitors did not select your organic listing, they may select your image, blog or business listing; offering more opportunities to obtain targeted visitors to your website.

And finally, some Universal Search results are bumped ahead of the organic listings. If your website is listed in the #12 spot on page two and you just can’t get your site to the 1st page, you may be able to have your images, videos or products listed above the organic results for specific search terms.

Users Intent

If you searched for the word “Apple” using Google in 1999, you were presented with various types of informational websites; discussing the various types of apples, how to use them in recipes and other great apple related information. But over time, people who typed in “Apple” would complete their search and then run another search for “Apple computers“. As this trend continued to happen, Google’s Algorithm learned that a trend was emerging. Most visitors who typed in the word Apple were looking for computers, not fruit.

Now when you type in “Apple” into Google, you are presented with the Macintosh Apple website, websites that review Apple computers and e-commerce stores where you can purchase an Apple computer. Google’s focus is to not only provide searchers with relevant search queries based on their search term, but to emulate the thought process that is derived from the search term itself.

When a searcher enters a query, Google’s artificial intelligence attempts to understand what the visitor may want to see before returning the search results. They have come to learn that when a visitor types in a brand name or a product, that searchers may want to:

  • See Photos of the Product
  • Read Product Reviews
  • Purchase The Product
  • Research The Product

In an attempt to give the visitor what they want they try to return the types of results related to the users intent.

To use Universal Search to your advantage, you must understand the user’s intent when they type in the search terms related to your website. The best way to see which universal search products are being used for your search terms is to search them within Google. Once you enter the search query, above the search results in the top left area of the screen you will see a listing for the products pulled into the results. For example, if I enter the search query “red scarf” I see the following Google Products listed at the top left area of the screen:

1. Web

2. Shopping

3. Images

Essentially this means that Google attempted to pull in (web) organic search results, Google Product Search and Google Images.

The Strategy

Creating a strategy to increase your rankings through Universal Search can allow you to locate opportunities that your competitors missed; giving you more exposure and targeted traffic.

In the example of the “red scarf”, you will notice that although Google attempted to pull in images, there aren’t any images displayed within the results. This essentially means that you could possibly receive a listing on the 1st page of Google via Google Images if you optimize your images and submit an Image Map through Google Webmaster Central. Additionally, you can upload your red scarves to Google Base to get them listed within the Google Shopping results.

Now if you visit the second page of results, you’ll see that they are now showing different universal search results.

  • Web
  • Video
  • Images

Towards the top of the results you will see 1 video; however in most searches where videos are in the results, you will usually see two. This indicates that you could potentially have a video listed towards the top of the second page. As you continue to view the remaining results on page two you will again notice that you don’t see any photos on page two; another opportunity to gain exposure over your competitors.

Once you have completed this type of research and analysis for the keywords important to your website, begin creating and optimizing your shopping feeds, videos, images, blog posts and other universal search products to gain the competitive advantage before your competitors do.

Optimizing Images

You can increase the chances of your images showing up for relevant search queries by optimizing your images. There are a few key areas that will help improve your ability to increase rankings for your images in Google Image Search, as well as where images are shown in Google Search.

Although these tips are for Google Images, these examples can be used throughout various areas of your website; to improve all of your universal search results.

File Names - Give your images accurate names rather than defaulting to what your camera or image editor provides. If the image is of a cashmere red scarf, then consider naming our image cashmere-red-scarf.jpg. This help to further classify the image and show relevancy to the search terms you are targeting.

Image Alt Attribute - Ensure that you have provided a quality description for your images using the image alt attribute. Try using product colors, sizes, materials, brand names, textures, manufacturer names etc. Remember not to overdo it, but provide an accurate description of the product to assist with increasing relevancy for desired search terms.

Captions - Include a caption for your image that describes or relates to the product. The text that surrounds the image helps Google to understand the subject matter of the image.

Anchor Text - The text you use when linking to the image helps to describe and classify the image. Try using descriptive anchor text rather than words such as “click here”, “larger image” or “more photos” when describing the link.

Google Image Labeler - While you can do your part in helping to optimize your images, you can also increase your chances of having your images appear in Google Image Search by allowing others to help classify your images through Google’s Image Labeler. By simply enabling the Google Image Labeler from the Google Webmaster Console, you allow Image Labeler users to provide words and phrases they believe accurately describe your images in a fun online game. As users are shown images from your website, they type in a few words they feel accurately describe the photo, which is later used to further classify the subject matter of your image.

Summary

Google has provided many new opportunities for you to reach searchers in the ways they want to be reached. Search engine optimization has been taken to another level; it’s no longer about who has the most number of pages, the best density; or who has the most inbound links. It is about who is utilizing the all their available opportunities.

Almost every aspect of your website is being analyzed and classified; use it to your advantage. Now is the time to take advantage of these opportunities and increase your visibility in every area of universal search; allowing you to increase your traffic and exposure in new and exciting ways.

About the Author

Leona Griffin is a SEO Specialist at 1st on the List Promotion Inc. As a 12 veteran search marketing professional, she specializes in universal search, on-page SEO and creating search marketing strategies that deliver long-term results for their clients.

By Rostin Reagor Smith in SE Tactics

SEM SEO Experts are finding ways of establishing higher ranking in search engine results by serving quality content to users. Over the past 10 years, SEO techniques have evolved with the demand of the search engines to serve quality search results to users requesting information. It all comes down to user experience and what online marketing professionals are doing to contribute to optimal search engine results. This evolution in demand for higher quality search results has forced SEO Consultants to develop new strategies for higher ranking. These online marketing professionals have learned from history and are achieving higher rankings for their clients by avoiding black hat marketing techniques. Whether you enjoyed history class or slept through it, you cannot afford to miss this lesson. Sleep too long and you may miss some important pointers from our marketing predecessors.

Ten years ago, the online marketing industry was comprised of traditional marketing professionals with a desire to bring their products to the online market. Most companies interested in marketing products online were marketing to consumers in ecommerce environments. A major consideration in any marketing plan included online traffic generated from search engines. In order to increase search engine traffic, black hat marketing techniques were used frequently to market products online. Keyword stuffing was a frequently used technique by SEO Consultants to achieve higher search engine ranking. Attempting to gain high rankings for a specifically targeted keyword or phrase, SEO Consultants would employ a keyword density of up to 50% to secure first page, first position listings in search engines. Needless to say, the results found by search engine users were less than optimal and the search engines were not serving the quality search engine results they were seeking for users on Yahoo, MSN, or Google.

Another tactic used by online marketers of the past was the establishment of link farms. That practice continues today. Over the past 10 years, SEO Consultants have used link farms to establish higher search engine rankings for their clients. Considered by most experts as black hat marketing techniques, link farms are a bank of links on a page which is established without a relevant theme or associated content to the link farm page. Since search engine optimization professionals realized a large factor in ranking depended upon the number of backlinks to their site, SEO Consulting firms of yesterday were allowing clients to establish links to any page online, regardless of the theme of the website. Today, search marketing experts are finding ways to establish backlinks from relevant theme associated content. By establishing relevant links within a theme or category, a website will be perceived at a higher value to the search engines for that particular category. SEO Consultants of today are finding that a higher perceived value within a category by Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, gives a website the ability to rank higher in search engine results.

Pop-up advertising and Spam are black hat marketing techniques once used by experts in online marketing to achieve higher search engine ranking. Today, search engines still use traffic as a factor in search engine ranking. However submission of identical content within comments on websites, creating identical pages linked to website content, or employing advertising companies to spam online users with pop up or pop under ads just to increase website traffic, will no longer assist websites in higher ranking. Quite the contrary, search engines are penalizing websites which employ black hat marketing. The penalty for using spam techniques can be as minor as a lower value to the search engines and associated search results ranking. The penalty of using black hat marketing techniques can be as severe as delisting with search engines for 6 months or longer.

Studying history gives us the opportunity to learn from our predecessors. The growth of the online marketing industry has established an incentivized environment for increased knowledge in the field of search engine optimization. These new consultants are including optimization of social media content, web 2.0 content and applications, article marketing, RSS feeds, podcasts, and video marketing to communicate directly with consumers at a level expected by the online market. The days of serving irrelevant content to online users and expecting to benefit from the dissemination of that content no longer exist. SEM SEO Experts of today have modified the practices of yesterday to offer techniques to their clients which are ranking higher with the search engines. These new techniques are more effective because they offer users the quality content for which they are requesting information. We are not only learning from the mistakes of our industry’s past, but the evolution of these new practices of online marketing professionals is providing a higher quality online experience.

With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith has refined the SEM SEO Expert Formula. Hundreds of case studies have combined to build the formula that drives search engine ranking through social marketing and web 2.0 communities and resources.

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