If you’re reading this, you’ve probably executed Search Engine Optimization campaigns and are interested in finding new ways to boost your website’s visibility and lead generation capabilities. True, SEO is a continuous process, and results might not come right away, but if you set your sights too far into the future, you may miss out on some immediate benefits. By implementing a pay-per-click lead generation campaign (PPC), you can quickly improve your SEO efforts both now and in the long run.

Both marketing channels are essentially trying to achieve the same goal – generate leads and increase sales revenue. When properly implemented, just about everything you do for SEO can be coordinated with your pay per click campaigns, and you can drive targeted traffic to your best and most profitable content using PPC. Combining PPC and SEO enables companies to maximize return on investment, provide consistent messaging, and jump start efforts that may have been slow to take off.

For newly developed brands or companies, marketers can use PPC to buy targeted traffic while the site gains search engine authority through SEO. At the point in time when your site has established its online reputation and built links and traffic flows, you can shift your strategy so that PPC becomes more of a complementary tactic.

Design Your Pages for People – Not Search Engines

This refrain is the go-to line of advice from Google’s Matt Cutts. Certainly, it is a safe phrase designed to summarize what your should do to boost your site’s SERPs, without disclosing Google’s secrets. If you have recently adopted ppc advertising after exhausting your seo ideas, buying traffic can be cathartic. PPC advertising is expensive. When you are charged for every click, you must rack your brain to maximize
the impact of each visitor. In doing so, you will notice that you begin to focus more on the behavior of visitors, and less on how you believe search engines will treat your content. You might be surprised to find out that by designing your content for users, you are actually designing it for search engines.

You can learn a lot about SEO by understanding PPC, and vice-versa. For instance, someone who has extensive experience with PPC can learn a lot regarding improving their quality scores by learning basic SEO basic best practices.

Unified Messaging

Many companies delegate the tasks of SEO and PPC to separate individuals. If this is the case in your organization, you should understand that both marketers are not competing with each other, are on the same team, and that their message needs to be unified. Both share the responsibility of driving traffic and generating leads. Communication is essential to ensuring that both marketers are utilizing similar phrasing and language. Again, the goal is the same, only the routes used to get there are different.

Social Media & Direct Links

It’s no secret that social graph metrics now play a key role in SERPs. By purchasing traffic, you increase the exposure of your website, and increase the opportunities for users to “like” your page, tweet your content, or directly link to it.

While social media recommendations, tweets, etc., are all the rage of late, direct links are still the most powerful avenue to boost your site’s rankings. Search engines treat backlinks from other sites as a recommendation of your site’s quality.

The same is true from social media, only with an added twist. Google now includes pages recommended through social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google’s very own +1, in search results for users. While this is still in its infancy, it stands to reason that recommended links experience a higher CTR than regular results, and thus, generate more leads.

CTR and Direct Search

Google’s algorithm has hundreds of components. Most SEOs believe that a site’s organic click through rate and volume of branded searches for your site are among factors Google looks at when ranking your site. By increasing the overall volume of traffic to your site, you are bound to see an increase in users searching directly for you.

Double Rainbow!

…or close enough, and it does mean something. Once your site has been indexed and ranks for your coveted keywords, you will begin to reap the benefits of valuable double links. A double link occurs when your organic listing appears on the same page as your ppc advertisement. Users will often see both listings and perceive your content to be relevant. Obviously, you would prefer if the user clicks on the free link, but even a click on your paid listing will improve your ad’s quality score, and reduce costs in the long run. Still, if possible, try to
creatively incentivize the user to click on the organic search result.

Conversion Data

Increasing the total volume of traffic to your site can give you a better idea of which keywords actually convert into leads and sales. By using SEO alone, you are limited to data surrounding the keywords for which you have a high rank.

You naturally have pre-conceived and biased notions of what the best keywords for your business may be. Often webmasters and marketing coordinators are surprised when they discover leads generated by keywords they once deemed irrelevant.

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Use SEM to Generate Organic Leads – A SPN Exclusive Article

As more and more people jump online and get comfortable with the ease of plunking down their credit card for purchases, it is becoming apparent that traditional marketing such as direct mail, advertising, and telemarketing just won’t be enough to get your small business over the top. Changes in the world that small business now sees are nothing short of mind-blowing. If you want to get your business, product or service noticed, you need to be marketing for search engines (SEM) and on board with the social media impact on business. Online tools today have changed the game and created new rules for information exchange and information commerce. Software as a service application, better known as SAAS, is bringing everything from Aunt Sadie’s bookkeeping services to your kid’s martial arts training regimen online as part of the mysterious but ever-expanding Cloud. Your business needs to be visible in the cloud, and marketing for search engines is your primary tactic of being found.

Interview with Ira Wolfe

The final piece of my Skype video interview with Ira Wolfe of Success Performance Solutions gets into the final 3 C’s of Marketing for Search Engines, including the most important piece of the puzzle – consistency.

As my VBlog guest Ira Wolfe sums it all up, here are the 4 Top Guidelines you need to know about successful marketing for search engines:

Content

If your website is your printed brochure and you like it that way, please click off of this page now! You cannot have any success online driving traffic to your site from search engines without content. Gobs of content! Oodles. Insane amounts of words, pics, video, music-whatever floats your boat. By insane amounts, recognize that there are millions of websites out there with, sit down, 1000s of pages of content!

Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo look at content as a measuring stick of how relevant your business is in the world. There are plenty of strategies, and unless your resources of money and bodies are unlimited, you can’t do them all. Article writing, for my blog and similar versions for dozens of other’s blogs and article sites, is a favorite strategy of mine. If you’re paying attention you just learned one way to get written content for your site. Syndicate it. This is great for those who fear content creation, don’t have time for it, or simply lack the confidence that anything they have to say is worth broadcasting. There are millions of bloggers and poor man’s authors out there dying for you to publish their material on your site for the simple favor of a return link or three to their websites or blogs.

Don’t like to write? That’s OK. Know what a ghost blogger is, Mr. big-time CEO? And in today’s full-color world, Google rewards pictures, properly tagged, even more. Even better is video. People, if you’ve been to my VBlog and seen me interviewing subject matter experts, it’s not because I think I have a career in film making or replacing Larry King. I want to get great information to my readers and video works fantastic, but it also boosts my search engine rankings in a major way. Boo-Yah!

If you want to know how to really beef up your content, just get a hold of me and I’ll give you some free tips and some other things you can do. I can even interview you for your own site promotion.

Connection

It ain’t a once and done world. Any good marketer knows that it may take a while for someone to warm up to your content, so you need to have plenty of it and keep refreshing it… a lot! Your goal is not to have them look on your site or blog once, but to bookmark it, subscribe to your RSS feed, and basically give you permission to market to them again and again. It’s that repetition of content in different forms, if possible, that wins over people. Once they subscribe, you’re now beyond idle chit chat and into the hand-holding phase of the relationship.
Keep going and you just might get to second base, where they like you enough to want to talk to you.

Conversation

Ahhh! Now we’re getting comfortable. If you subscribe to or read any blog posts, you know that 99.9% of them have a box to encourage you to have a take and don’t suck about it. You also see all those tiny little squares on websites, all over the place (just check mine-get your dead cat out again), asking you to follow them on Facebook, re-Tweet them, subscribe, StumbleUpon, or otherwise talk to the site, rate the blog, or product, or picture – get it! This is just marketing recognition of the importance of dialogue and chatter in today’s world. Exploiting this correctly is the main way social media helps small business. Everyone is a critic, yes, and torque-off the wrong, angry blogger or hacker at your own risk, but most ordinary humans have real lives without the time to spend it on wrecking yours with vitriolic bile in cyberspace. Create a conversation with your customers, and soon you’ll have them creating positive, happy, fluffy conversations about your business. Do this right and go viral and you’re a celebrity in your own little business niche, and that ain’t chump change, friends.

Consistency

This is the most important C of the Big 4 for marketing for search engines. Every day, millions of pages of content get loaded onto the Internet and indexed by Google, Yahoo and the boys. Not to mention, the rules and algorithms that the major search engines use to determine relevance in the world are constantly changing. What that means to you is, if you are trying to get any search engine traffic at all to do enough business for you to buy a Happy Meal, you need to be engaging in this stuff weekly. Monthly? Cute. Once per quarter? Google does not suffer fools easily. The Internet is a – what have you done for me lately – world. On top of the world today, living in a refrigerator box tomorrow.

Don’t let me be misunderstood (note to self, try to develop some lyrics around that), you need to consistently market to the search engine universe to succeed at the game. Having said that, if your content is wholesome, good stuff, the huge benefit of the online world is that your stuff never dies! I heard a guy on a YouTube video say, “Google never forgets.” I have articles from 10 years ago that are ranked in the top 3 of certain undisclosed keywords to this day! It can be a beautiful thing. The problem is, you never know what is going to last. It’s simple really. You don’t know what the rest of the world is going to do that might be more relevant than the pearls you posted last week. The best you can do is keep going. You’ll hit some grand slams at times, but you will end up scoring more runs in the long run with singles, walks and being hit by the pitch. Grab your Louisville Slugger and step up to the plate.

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Marketing for Search Engines

Yahoo! Search Marketing is trailing behind Google AdWords program, we are all aware about that. However, this is exactly the reason why you should try it- few competition, lesser bid fees and a higher conversion. Online marketers/advertisers who want to test out new markets and introduce their products are slowly turning Yahoo! PPC into their new hotspot because of its affordability. Let’s find out what all you should keep in mind while working with Yahoo! PPC.

Benefit from Your Precious Click Through Rate Data: The previous click through trends are utilized to determine the quality of your ad, even though it is definitely not the sole determining gauge of Yahoo! when studying your ad.

Therefore, it means that sometimes you have to be more patient when building your campaign to get a favorable ROI with Yahoo! PPC. The trails of successful campaigns that you may have experience in the past may be exceeded by your possible victories with Yahoo! PPC. Be sure to weigh in all the factors at hand and not just on this. When you’ve decided to run a PPC campaign on Yahoo!, it’s important that you have an upfront investment ready to make sure your campaign is successful. It is important that your first deposit, upon opening your account, will not cause hardship and be prepared to cover additional costs with your campaign. The minimum amount that you need to deposit is $30. Hopefully your campaign will make money, so that is why you have to optimize it and keep track of CPC expenses.

Track Your Ads: Undoubtedly, the only way to ensure the success of your PPC campaigns with Yahoo! is to make sure you are tracking all your statistics. Yahoo! does offer some tools to help you track your stats and generate reports, but you should never rely just on those. The idea is that you want to remove keywords that aren’t responding well to advanced matches and aren’t generating positive results, which can only be achieved when you have detailed information, something which Yahoo! fails to provide. Your advanced match keywords need to be culled with a list of terms to be removed, and the only way to compile this list is with detailed tracking.

If you’re aiming for a flourishing Yahoo! PPC campaign, aim on the minutest areas that need improvement and don’t forget to upgrade the quality of your ads. Bear in mind that the important output of PPC advertising are the results – if you are able to attain a good ROI from impressive results, then you can call for a celebration.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing – What You Need to Know

It’s a rarity for businesses to not operate a website these days. Even small mom-and-pop shops that began long before the era of the Internet have gone digital, albeit some were a little more hesitant than others. But while launching a website – whether for a multi-national, billion dollar corporation or the local pizza place – may be easy, to have that website actively help grow the business is another matter all together. Simply having a website (one among the ever-expanding billions) isn’t enough to earn a business any attention, promote its brand or increase its profit margins. Search engine optimization, the practice of making changes in different areas of a website so that search engines can help find and deliver targeted audiences to the site, is practically meaningless unless companies first consider several issues.

The first issue to launching a successful site is determining the purpose of that site. Is a business looking to generate leads or sales? Is the site simply a branding tool, perhaps to promote a new line of products? It’s critical to decide what actions the site is supposed to encourage visitors to take. Say the website’s goal is to encourage visitors to call an office. Are there phones and staff ready to handle the incoming calls when the site delivers them? Having a call to action for website visitors but no follow through on the company side is just as bad as having no call to action in the first place.

Next, a business needs to take a serious look at who its audience is. This should have been decided when first developing a business plan, but maybe the demographic need to be tweaked for online audiences. Different demographics “Millennials vs Boomers for instance” approach the Internet in different ways and businesses should carefully hone in on the best prospects.

Finally, businesses need to realistically determine competition. While the audiences might be the same, the Gap is not necessarily competing with a local boutique in Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s important to consider geographic and business factors when determining true competition. Who is directly competing in the same market space, with the same products and looking to target a similar audience. While both the Gap and the boutique are clothing stores, they cater to different clientele and operate on much different budgets. At the end of the day, that local boutique cannot compete with the advertising budget of the Gap, so it should look to be competing with the other boutique across town.

Many of the aforementioned factors should already exist in a business plan or marketing plan. But it is easy to forget the basics when faced with the daunting task of implementing a successful website and SEO plan to promote it. There are several tools that exist to help a business determine the best keywords for its site, provide the traffic sources of its competitor’s site and grad the site on its content, trust value and more. Once the ground work is in place, successful, long term SEO and SEM strategies can be created.

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Internet Marketing- Before Going Online – A SPN Exclusive Article

For every website owner, the one most important goal to be accomplished is establishing exposure for the site. But while there are several ways of establishing a particular website’s presence on the internet, only a few of these can be considered as really effective or worth the effort.

One really efficient way of establishing web presence for a site is through search engine marketing. Website owners can take advantage of search engines by getting their websites to show up on very specific search results listings that are being returned whenever a person is searching for something through the use of search engines.

However way you look at it, any website that is receiving a huge amount of traffic into it has the much bigger chance of making more profits compared to one that has very minimal web exposure. In other words, higher volume of traffic is equivalent to higher percentage of sales and conversions for a site.

When it comes to getting huge volumes of traffic to a site, search engine marketing is definitely a winning medium to achieve such goal. Just imagine your website showing up at the top listings of specific search results whenever people are searching for information exactly relevant to your site. The only problem is, that ranking a website on top of the search engine results pages is not as easy as it may sound. In fact, very few website owners really have the adequate knowledge needed to really perform such task successfully.

Aside from search engine marketing, there is another popular medium for bringing traffic to a website. This medium is through the use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media marketing, although an extremely popular means of driving traffic to a website, this method is not as effective as getting traffic through search engines. The reason is that social media traffic is not as targeted compared to the traffic being produced through the search engines.

The very concept why search engine marketing is so effective is that because people are able to search items or information by typing in very specific keywords or terms that are exactly related and relevant to what they are searching for. Because of this system, if your website is ranked well on top of the search results listings, then your site will no doubt be getting its share of ultra targeted traffic as a result.

With search engine marketing, you can either opt for the paid method which is popularly known as PPC or pay per click advertising, or you can stick with the method of ranking your website at the top of the search engine results pages. Whichever approach you pursue to follow, you can still be guaranteed that what you are getting is highly targeted and quality traffic towards your website.

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Search Engine Marketing – Still The Best Form Of Driving Traffic To A Website

The newly coined term ‘results measurement’ is used by companies to define the purposes of lead tracking in SEM campaigns, and is a valuable means of understanding the many decision factors your prospects use to choose your company for its products/services. A finely-tuned lead tracking channel – often aided by your search engine marketing company – demonstrates to the potential customer that his or her inquiry about your company’s products/services was received with a sense of urgency. For SEM campaigns, proper lead tracking may not be the only fast track solution to increased sales, but does give potential customers insight into how your company values its leads. With a greater ability to track leads and responses, an immediate follow-up is also possible, allowing prospects to decide if your response time was fast enough and if your company provided a better customer experience than your competitors.

In the last article, we discussed how an ideal lead tracking scenario equates to greater success when it comes to closing leads in SEM campaigns. Plus, knowing where your leads come from helps determine which channel is the most profitable and, of course, which should be continually refined to bring in even more quality leads. Though this may be common knowledge, we are led to the two less-than-ideal scenarios that are unfortunate, though surprisingly frequent, despite the prevalence of comprehensive lead tracking software and tools.

Lead Tracking Scenarios

Scenario #2: Workable– The client company cannot, for whatever reason, have web leads automatically populated in its sales database, which, in this case, is often a proprietary system built in-house. Yet, there are still some ways to identify leads properly, which your search engine marketing company can help you compile for SEM campaigns. PPC leads, for example, can be supplemented with added parameters when sent to an inbox to reveal their source. With the right lead tracking in place, you can easily have emails pop right into your inbox with a header that notifies you that you’ve just received a lead via a specific channel. In these cases, the onus is on the person who enters the leads into the sales database to also include the lead’s source.

Ideally, your search engine marketing company needs to meet and/or correspond regularly with you to discuss the source and quality of each lead within your SEM campaigns. Leads can be analyzed at the individual level, so that when a lead closes, it can be attributed to the proper channel (organic SEO, email marketing, PPC, etc). With frequent collaboration between the search engine marketing company and the client company, ROI for each individual channel can be deduced, and expenditures on each channel can be properly allocated to maximize performance.

Scenario #3: Common but Unfortunate– In this scenario, the client company usually has limited offline lead tracking ability. Sometimes the leads are sent directly to varying sales people who use their own individual systems for tracking their leads within SEM campaigns.

Clearly, this limits the ability of the search engine marketing company to properly allocate ROI to individual web channels. Even if the individual sales people take note of where the individual leads came from, compiling all of that data into something useful can be a bit like herding cats. The client company also can’t determine which online sales and marketing initiatives are the most effective to developing SEM campaigns and could therefore unknowingly cut the most profitable initiatives when times are tough. Another consequence is that your sales department could be spending time chasing bad leads from the same sources day after day and not even know it.

Furthermore, when your search engine marketing company is trying to come up with ROI calculations, the math tends to get fuzzy. You and your search engine marketing company are left with vague numbers regarding offline closure rates, value of the average sale, and the like, making any attempt at deriving useful ROI figures a virtual stab in the dark. As you can imagine, such a system does not allow for informed decisions in regard to your individual online initiatives.

Increasing Your SEM Lead Tracking Abilities for Success

As a company, we work very hard to get clients up to at least the workable scenario (#2) in order to prove the value of individual online initiatives and to knowledgeably hone SEM campaigns for the best possible return. Even though scenario #3 isn’t the most effective and modern way to run a sales department, it is still fairly common. We’ve had many clients who had very weak tracking elements in place, and, step by step, we’ve cajoled them into a more uniform and robust tracking system.

Almost invariably, once clients see the impact on their bottom lines through improved lead tracking, they start demanding more and more tracking information and transparency – rightly so. Of course, any good search engine marketing company will be more than happy to oblige.

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Chasing Leads: Offline Lead Tracking in SEM Campaigns, Pt. 2

Top Rankings Maintenance For Google

Over the many years of marketing online, one point has been driven home to me time and again, you must not only get those top rankings in Google for your chosen keyword phrases – but you must maintain them. In other words, you must not only get those top rankings but you must keep them at the top.

Rankings maintenance, link maintenance… call it what you will, for most competitive keywords in Google, if you want to stay at the top you will have to constantly build quality links to your featured web page. Now, there are exceptions, if your domain contains exactly the keyword phrase then this ranking factor alone will probably keep you at the top of the pile.

However, in most cases, my own experiences have shown, if you don’t regularly add links pointing to your promoted web page it will fall off the first page in Google. For very lucrative keywords, this can prove very costly.

One of the easiest ways to build quality one-way links to your web pages is to write keyworded articles and submit them to the many free online article directories. This alone will usually keep your top rankings in Google – I have been doing this for over 7 or 8 years and have consistently kept my listings at the top of Google. If I don’t regularly write these articles, my rankings will fall off the first page in Google.

But article marketing has lost some of its muster in recent years, mainly because of the growng importance of social bookmarking sites in search engine rankings. Obviously, another marketing strategy is to constantly build links to your promoted pages/content through these social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

Most times this is as simple as making it easy for your visitors to bookmark your content. Providing handy bookmark logos and icons will make it easier for your visitors to bookmark your content for you – in the process they’re building valuable one-way links to your web pages and boosting your rankings in the search engines.

Another avenue is YouTube videos… lately I have noticed just getting an active video which receives many comments and good ratings will raise your rankings in Google or rather Google will list your video at the top of their search results which means more targeted traffic to your site or page.
The viral nature of these videos will also help in your link building efforts, since webmasters will often feature the video and also mention/link to your site in the process.

Same goes for Twitter, constantly getting tweets will also keep your page or site in the limelight. Of course, some subtle bribery goes a long way, just offering a free ebook or course if someone tweets your content is a simple, yet very effective way of getting your content noticed more, especially with the search engines.

Another effective tactic is regularly adding keyword related content or pages to your sites and linking back to your promoted page. Don’t overdo this, just naturally add content to your sites as you would normally do and in the process you’re building links to your page, helping you stay at the top in Google.

Regardless of how you go about it, constantly adding links and maintaining your top rankings in Google is a major part of your online marketing. While all this may seem obvious to the professional online marketer, many beginning webmasters and marketers believe once they reach the top in Google, they can sit and relax. They can but after a little while if they don’t maintain and build further links, in most cases these top rankings will soon disappear.

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Maintaining Your Top Rankings In Google

Only half joking when I say Google’s new search engine will be YouTube, because there are many strange things happening in Googleland. As a professional search engine marketer I have to keep my eyes glued to what is happening with Google, the most dominant search engine in the North American marketplace, if not the world.

Since my livelihood depends achieving high rankings in the search engines, you more or less become conditioned to jump every time one of them makes a move, especially Google. Recent changes within Google with the Caffeine and the May Updates (we won’t even mention the WonderWheel) had a few of my profitable keyword rankings in Google jumping all over the place.

Well, things have calmed down and everything has fallen back into place and traffic to most of my sites are up. However, even before the dust has settled on those changes, Google is on the move again. There are rumors that Google is developing a Facebook killer, its own social networking site that could compete with Facebook.

Can this be true?

Only Google knows for sure but there are some other concrete changes which already have been made by Google which keeps one wondering. For example, Google has moved the enormous list of YouTube users into its Google Accounts system. You can no longer log into your YouTube account with your old username and password, users must switch and log in through their Google Account.

This is somewhat curious because ever since Google bought it in 2006 for $1.65 billion, YouTube has kept its own brand. Why consolidate it with Google Accounts? Could this move have something to do with the endless stream of data and content which is flowing into YouTube every second? More importantly, does this change now make the handling or manipulation of this data easier for Google to incorporate into its search engine rankings?

This has to be questioned because there are other recent changes within YouTube which are also curious. Users can no longer rate videos on a five star system but must now use a thumbs up for like or a thumbs down for dislike. A much more “Black and White” rating system which is more in line with the one used at Facebook.

Forget the Bing/Yahoo union which has already begun, Facebook is becoming Google’s biggest competitor when it comes to online search. Facebook is showing the traffic and numbers which can make a one-trick pony like Google more than a little jumpy. Google has to compete with Facebook, not only for the attention of the majority of web users, but also now when it comes to online search.

Granted, Facebook is still in its infancy when it comes to search, but its “Like” rating system and search box must have Google paying attention. Keep in mind, Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol doesn’t rely upon keywords but lets users rate the webpages which are most popular or liked. This grass roots consumer or user ranking system will grow in importance as the general surfing public becomes more aware of just how “fake” or “manufactured” organic results are in the major search engines, including Google.

Link buying and selling, keyword positioning, fake software generated content… all are making it hard for search engines to return valid organic results to web users. One obvious solution is to draw more of your organic results from real live voting users who actually rate the content or webpage. These kinds of ratings are much more harder to manipulate by the big multi-national companies who have suddenly realized the pure economic generating power of getting top rankings for lucrative keywords in the search engines.

One would expect the importance of old style backlinks to be replaced by more valuable social bookmarks, such as how many Diggs, Tweets, Facebook and YouTube Likes… will determine what rankings a piece of content receives in the search engines of the very near future. And in the process, one would also expect the already massive corruption of organic search results, to become much more democratic and truly reflect how web users rate content on the web.

Most savvy webmasters have already made it easy for their visitors to bookmark and rate their content by displaying handy social bookmark logos and buttons on their sites. This is probably a wise route to take as the search engines, especially Google, will probably place more emphasis and value on user generated ratings supplied by such sites as Facebook and YouTube.

….
All views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author Titus Hoskins, who is a full-time online marketer. To find out more about him and his sites, just Google his name.

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Google’s New Search Engine: YouTube!

SEO consulting has become an integral part of Internet marketing success in today’s saturated web world. As corporate America inevitably shifts to a focus on online information and transactions, the reputation of a company can be made or broken in a matter of mouse clicks. As a result, the importance of being “found” online and being found the right way cannot be overstated.

Many companies understand the need for optimization of their webpages, but know little about how to make it effectively happen. Half-hearted optimization attempts or those created by employees who are untrained in the area of SEO can easily sink a business rather than help it rise above.

A certified SEO consultant can help a business design a plan for their website and their company, helping them to rank on the first page of search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, in addition to any number of smaller and more specifically-focused search engines. However, SEO consulting is not simply limited to being #1 on every page. There are multiple facets to any solid SEO campaign, and every business would do well to meet with an SEO consultant to discuss which parts of keyword and website optimization would be most beneficial to their unique goals. Perhaps the best way to understand the impact of SEO consulting is to briefly examine five of the ways in which a consultant can help grow a business by effectively managing a client’s online presence.

First, SEO consultants can take a look at a company’s local presence. How well is the business known in the neighborhood and the community? If the answer is not at all and its target market is its immediate surroundings, then it may be best to undergo a consultation for a local SEO campaign. Specialists can help to get the business listed in multiple local directories, as well as the larger national directories, to get the process of positive recognition started. The most loyal and dedicated customers can be some of the best supporters of a business, both by word-of-mouth and online.

However, local optimization is often not enough for many companies – merely an excellent first step on the long road to online success. SEO consultants can also examine a business’s national footprint, and determine how to most effectively increase their online profile. Using the latest Web 2.0 technology, a solid SEO consulting program can drive the right kind of traffic to a company’s website – the kind that is interested not simply in “window shopping”, but that has a strong chance of converting and re-visiting.

SEO consulting can also take the form of customized packages, such as a focus on individual product submission to search engines for companies that are heavily involved in E-commerce. For these companies, hiring a consultant to enter each of their products individually into engines such as Google can dramatically increase sales volume.

While SEO consultants typically focus on ways to drive traffic to a company’s webpage and to make sure that information about the company is easily available, there are situations in which reverse SEO consulting can be useful. In these instances, incorrect or damaging information about the company may have become public or highly ranked, and an SEO consultant can help to ensure that this misinformation is pushed to the far recesses of major search engines, and supplanted with updated and corrected data.

Search engine optimization and the submission of the relevant details to major search engines are practices that require planning and research. Finding the right SEO consultant to provide effective services at a reasonable price can vastly improve a company’s Internet presence.

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Understanding the Many Facets of SEO Consulting

Thousands of free online marketing tools clamor for attention, with new ones popping up every week it seems. You know you should be doing more to reach out to your customers, but just researching which tools to use can be a vast time investment, even if they don’t require a big financial outlay.

Below is a compiled a list of the most popular (or most useful) low-cost or free small business marketing tools. You might be using some of them already, but you’re sure to find a couple that will round out your small business marketing toolkit nicely. And, if you’re just starting out marketing a new business online, this list may help point you in the right direction.

Directories

The Open Directory – A staple of the SEO crowd, this directory can be tricky to get into but well worth it for the link juice it passes along to your site.

Yahoo! Directory – It’s not free – this directory will set you back a couple hundred bucks a year – but it’s well worth it for inclusion.

Best of the Web Directory – This directory has been around a while and can pass along some good PageRank to your site.

Niche Directories

Find the directories in your industry that pass along good link building opportunities. Some examples to get you started: SBDGraphics.com for ad agencies, web developers, printers and other graphics professionals; sbdpro.com for small businesses and businesses that serve them; Cpapro.com for the accounting industry; SEOAlpaca.org for alpaca breeders, and so on.

Press Release Distribution Services

Marketwire – The most bang for your buck from an actual wire service, Marketwire’s prices are lower than PR Newswire and Businesswire. This newer service is built for powerful online exposure, and you’ll enjoy the full online distribution with any geographical AP wire distribution. (Sometimes you can get statewide wire distribution for nearly the same cost as only your local metropolitan area.) It’s great for building inbound links – just choose the SEO Enhanced option.

PRLog – A good-performing free press release distribution outlet, PRLog press releases rank really well and for a really long time if they are written with SEO copywriting best practices. Press releases include three links, though they are URL based (starting with http) rather than text anchor. PRLog also lets you create your own newsroom where all your press releases reside, as well as an “about us” page and product showcase area.

PitchEngine – A relatively new PR-for-social-media site that promises to let you create and share press releases easily and for free and syndicate content to Google News. Lets you include HTML in your press release, so you can use keyword text anchor links. The site is marketing itself quite aggressively and will likely build a big presence quickly. The only catch is your release will disappear off the site after 30 days if you aren’t a paid member ($50/month for your own press room).

Email Marketing

AWeber – AWeber makes it easy to start building your email marketing list, if you haven’t already. For less than $20/month, you can build unlimited newsletter lists, send unlimited email blasts, and email unlimited autorespond messages to up to 500 subscribers/list. (Then it’s $29/month up to 2500 subscribers.) Also offers a recurring 30% commission – a pretty good affiliate program for a service you’ll appreciate enough to recommend to others. (Disclosure note: the link above is our affiliate link. We’ve been using the service for 3 years now, after trying out Constant Contact and researching about 20 other providers! Most either do autoresponders or email blasts/newsletters – not both.)

Content Sharing Websites

Squidoo – Create a lens around your business area. A good one with lots of information will even rank in the search engines and can bring traffic to your web site.

Scribd – Share your expert content like white papers and articles. You can make them available for free or sell them. You can submit documents in PowerPoint, Word, PDF and many other file formats.

SlideShare – Post your presentations and documents online for others to view and share. This is a great way to get exponential exposure for your sales or marketing materials – or share documents privately. See some tips for getting more visibility with SlideShare: http://bit.ly/aNXmS2

Flikr – Does your product or service translate well visually? Use this popular photo sharing site to get more eyeballs.

Blip.tv – A video-sharing alternative to YouTube, blip.tv lets you embed links in your descriptions and create a TV station showing all your videos in one spot.

Social Networks

Facebook – Create a page for your business. Feed your blog in. Start a group. Get fans. Advertise to targeted users if your products appeal to the Facebook crowd (which is basically everyone nowadays). See using the new Facebook business page layout to learn more. Stop by our page and become a fan, too!

MySpace – Take a second look at this medium for social networking. According to MarketingProfs, more than half of MySpace.com users are 35 or older. Explore using MySpace for your business.

LinkedIn – Like a virtual Rolodex. Build your professional profile, link up with other professionals, join groups or even start a group. Participating in Q&A’s related to your profession is a great way to build credibility and visibility.

Ning – Build your own social network around your business. You may even get your network into the search engine results pages. Learn more about using Ning for business. (http://bit.ly/amLKcE)

Read “Utlize Social Media to Gain Additional Exposure for Your Site” (http://bit.ly/bcoWEQ) for more information about social networks and how they can drive targeted traffic to your site.

Social Bookmarking

Digg – Getting your content on the home page of Digg is one way to bump up your web site’s traffic by thousands within minutes. This can result in valuable links to your site. Start with this beginner’s guide to Digg.

StumbleUpon – Build friends and send them your articles to rate. More thumbs up will get your article shown to more people outside your network and can result in thousands of visitors every day. Tips for using StumbleUpon.

Reddit – Even if your content gets buried on Digg, it can flourish on Reddit – which can be a catalyst for jumping to the home page of other social bookmarking sites. Learn more about the types of topics that do well on Reddit.

Blogs

Your own blog -

Write great content relevant to your business area that people will find useful. Use it to link to deep pages on your site to help them get indexed in the search engines. Build your thought leadership and let your customers get to know your business better. Try WordPress for an easy-to-use platform that’s also search engine friendly.

Others’ blogs -

Read and comment on other blogs in your industry. Use your comment signature to link back to your blog or web site. Build relationships online and spread the link love from your own blog to others’.

Twitter

Micro-blogging. Update your status daily or a couple times a week. Use keywords in your posts and profile to help gain followers on Twitter quickly. Link to your unique content in your updates and take advantage of the multitude of new applications created to help you manage your Twitter experience.

Affiliate Marketing

Post Affiliate Pro

Traditionally links generated through affiliate marketing have not been helpful for search engine optimization – until Post Affiliate Pro, that is. This easy-to-use affiliate program lets you set up a referral program in minutes and keeps your links simple and search engine friendly.

Technorati

Claim your blog at Technorati to make sure it’s indexed in the blog search engines and have your updates broadcast across the network.

Your Own Web Properties

Create A Knowledge Center

Build a content area on your site where you can add articles regularly. This can be as formal as white papers or case studies, but it can also work with less formal articles, as long as they further your company’s thought leadership position and credibility. They will also boost your search engine rankings if you contribute regularly and ensure your site architecture is optimized. See how we’re doing this with SEO Advantage’s new knowledge center.

PowerReviews

People are going to look up user reviews whether on your site or elsewhere – might as well take advantage of the user-generated content for additional search engine visibility. You’ll also rank higher in trust with your efforts at transparency.

SurveyMonkey

Voting/polling/surveys. A tool of engagement that lets you gauge interest, measure customer satisfaction or just provide some fun. (People love to give their opinions.)

Awards and Contests

Enter them and host them. Winning an industry award can add to your credibility, and giving them out can get you lots of press coverage and links. Get creative.

Search Engine Optimization

Make sure your site architecture is optimized for maximum exposure in the search engines. Create link-building campaigns. Add to your content regularly. Enlist the services of a search engine optimization company to guide your efforts or handle implementation completely.

Research

Google

Designate the keywords you’d like to keep track of, and Google will send you alerts of news and pages indexed on those topics “as it happens” with Google News Alerts. You can also enter multiple terms at Google Trends to compare the general level of buzz around those terms.

AllTop

An “online magazine rack”, this site aggregates content and organizes it. Select your topics and have the latest content delivered to you, or just browse the site when you’re in research mode. Also, be sure to submit your site so it shows among the related content.

WordTracker

Find keywords with a more comprehensive tool than free pay-per-click research tools, which may skew results. A free trial will give you an idea of how it works.

Yahoo! Pipes

See who’s talking about your company or brand by pulling together RSS feeds from different sources around the Web using the beta Yahoo! Pipes. This handy video shows you how.

Analytics

You need to measure all your online marketing efforts. If you’re looking for a free analytics package, try Google Analytics or Yahoo! IndexTools. (Which is better?) However, you’ll probably want some help implementing and interpreting your analytics package to get the most from it – ask your SEO company if they offer this.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

39 Free/Low-Cost Tools for Marketing Your Small Business Online