Archive for February, 2011
Guest Blogging
Posted by Kayla in Uncategorized on February 28, 2011
Guest Bloggers
We are always looking for opportunities to guest blog and we also welcome topical guest bloggers.
If you guest blog for us, you need to provide high quality, original content. You can get one link in the body of the post and another link at the end, in a bio or resource box.
Relevant topics include things like SEO Search Engine Optimization, Local Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Keyword Analysis, DIY Search Engine Optimization, Process Analysis, User Experience Design, User Interface Design, Online Community Building, Email Marketing, and more.
5 Ways to Increase Customer Engagement on Your Website
Posted by Kayla in Internet Communities, social media, social media marketing (SMM) on February 26, 2011
Advertising and marketing “at” people is quickly going the way of the dinosaurs.
With DVR’s and Tivo, people have ways to flash past tv ads.
With Internet radio, XM/Sirius radio, and other musical listening options, people now have access to commercial free radio.
People want to interact. And if you provide content that facilitates interaction, you have a possibility of being able to build your brand, increase your engagement with customers, and getting people to view your web site as a compelling destination.
- Utilize Facebook Pages to increase customer engagement. Facebook pages provide many customer engagement opportunities.
- Open your business page’s wall post up to other people. Yes, you may risk negative comments, but you also have an opportunity to respond to them.
- Allow other people to promote themselves on your Facebook Page Wall. If you are a tack and feed store, let people post their tack for sale. If you are a coffee shop, let people post their community events. Build a water cooler and people will come hang out around it!
- Utilize Facebook Groups. Take your subject matter area of your business, and if appropriate, you can build a group around it. Again, this is giving people a chance to huddle around the water cooler, chit chat, and build community.
- Increase Engagement by Posting Questions! You can post questions to your Facebook Wall Page, questions to your blog. People like to talk. Ask them what they think and they just might be happy to tell you.
- Use Polls on your Website or Facebook Page. There are many companies who provide reasonably priced polling software, and many even have a free option. People love to take polls. It’s an easy way for them to engage without having to put themselves out too much. cnn.com uses daily polls as a way to engage their audience. You can do the same.
- Add a Bulletin Board to your website. If you are using a platform that allows plugins, such as WordPress, you can find plugins that will let you add a bulletin board. This may not be useful if you don’t have some minimum of traffic yet.
Building an engaged audience takes work and takes constant feeding. It’s not necessary or relevant for every business, but it may be relevant for yours.
What kind of problems does your business solve? And are those problems things people want to talk about or network about?
Look for opportunities to engage your customers and you will increase your relevance to them.
Step-by-Step Local SEO and Local Internet Marketing
Posted by Kayla in 101, DIY, internet marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on February 25, 2011
Local Internet Marketing and local Search Engine Optimization can be done more efficiently than optimizing for a country or the whole world.
This article will give you 10 ways to get started doing search engine optimization for your local business website and get you started marketing your business on the Internet.
- List your business on Google Maps and Google Places. It’s free. Follow the local business instructions at Google.
- Add special offers to your Google Maps local business web listing.
- Add your city name to the <title> pages of your web site. If you’re in a small suburb, consider adding the nearest major city name, depending on the geographical region you want to bring business in from.
- Make sure that your web site has contact information with your address. Consider adding it to every page of your web site.
- “Claim” your profile on Merchant Circle, Yahoo Local, local.com, and anywhere else you can find.
- See if you can get links from your local Chamber of Commerce, local business groups, local business directories, local newspapers, and see if you can get links from your vendors.
- There are many yellow pages-like sites that let you update or add your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. So at the very least, visit all you can find, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your business web site. Here’s a list of sites that will let you claim your business on the Internet.
- See if you can exchange links with businesses that serve the same market as you do, but don’t compete with you. Don’t like to sites that are entirely irrelevant to your site!
- Start a blog! Nowadays, content is king. And if you can develop your web site into a trusted resource, potential customers will seek you out. You can establish yourself as an authority and at the same time, you will be optimizing your site for search engines. Your blog can be part of your main site, or can be a separate link.
- Make a video! You don’t need a big budget or a video production house to do it for you. If you have a video camera, point it at yourself and just talk. Tell people what you do. Express your passion for your business. Mention your website a few times. Then put the video on Youtube and also insert it into your own website. If you want a more polished video, look into services like www.spotzer.com, walkonsite.com, www.mixpo.com, www.turnhere.com
If you prefer to outsource your internet marketing and have someone else do your local search engine optimization, contact us at 702.530.9393 or by emailing us at kblock
Don’t Build Your Website in Flash
Posted by Kayla in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), user interface design on February 24, 2011
Flash can make web sites look beautiful. Many businesses that don’t know a lot about technology, get sucked into having Flash-based web sites, because they look cool. But there are major problems with Flash and unless you provide an alternative, you may be locking out your customers.
The Problems with Flash
- The iPad and iPhone do not handle Flash, and support for other cellphones is limited or non-existent. If your website visitors ever use mobile devices to access your web site, you don’t want to lock them out.
A typical scenario: a customer is on their way to your office. They forgot your address. They look for your web site on their phone and they get nothing. Don’t let this happen! - Flash is not accessible. Blind people browse the web using screen readers. These screen readers cannot interpret Flash content.
- If you want to be found on Google and other search engines, Flash will be hugely detrimental. Googlebot can’t read your Flash files, and neither can any other search engine spider. You cannot do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on a site that is built in Flash.
- Flash will not generally let anyone bookmark a specific page on your web site. Most Flash sites have one url. There are some workarounds to this but many sites don’t implement them. Again, this is one of the many ways that Flash interferes with Search Engine Optimization.
- Someone trying to search for something on your page, won’t find anything. Ctrl-f (on Windows), can’t find anything on your Flash based page.
- Flash is slow! Have you ever visited a web site and seen the flashing words, “loading…” You’re waiting for Flash to load and so are your customers. Not everyone is patient enough to wait for your Flash based web site to load.
- Your web site visitors have no control over text size. If you’re under 40, you may not have ever realized that with HTML based web sites, you can adjust the font size. For those with failing closeup vision, this may be mandatory in order to view your site. There is no way for your website visitor to change font sizes if your site is Flash-based.
If you love the look of Flash, HTML5 can give you similar functionality and appearance with full compatibility for Apple devices and friendly Search Engine Optimization. Check out the portfolio of sample HTML5 designs.
In sum, Flash is great for games. It can be great for small widgets. But if you want your web site to be usable, you want it to be findable, and you want people to be able to access it, tell your web site developer that you don’t want your site built in Flash!
Help New Customers Find You
Posted by Kayla in 101, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media on February 22, 2011
In the US alone, about 15.5 billion searches are conducted every month.
People search for information. 42% of them use search engines every day!
They search for solutions to their problems. They search for food. They search for products. They search for phone numbers. And they just might be searching for YOU!
But can they find you?
People are rarely using phone directories anymore. To find information, they are using search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or they are using specialized information services like Yelp.
If you can’t be found on these search engines, you are missing out on significant business.
You need to think about what people are searching for when you want them to find you. They’re not looking for your company name. They are looking for the name of the products and services you carry.
If your company name is “New Horizons”, but you carry “green building supplies”, you will bring in new business and new customers, if people can find you by searching for “green building supplies.”
You can get found by paying for advertising. If your keywords (“green building supplies”) are popular, you may spend a fortune to get your ad seen.
Or you can build up your web site through “white hat” search engine optimization techniques that will get you found by potential customers.
Techniques to get you found go beyond just search engine marketing. People look for information on Social Media web sites such as Facebook. They may look for information on Youtube. The nature of your business and customers will determine how your potential customers are trying to find you.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Posted by Kayla in 101, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on February 22, 2011
Crawling the Web
Search engines use a “robot” or “bot” to crawl the web. The robot is sometimes referred to as a “spider.” The robot will look at the words on a site, minus words like, “the”, “a”, “and”, and create an index of what it finds. The spider will also follow the links it finds on a site to build the index even further.
Determining Relevancy
When someone enters a query into a search engine, the search engine needs to figure out what results go to the first page and what order to display the results in.
On most search engines, at the top of the results page, you will find Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising as shown below.
Just under the paid search engine results, or Pay-Per-Click results, you will find what are called “organic search results.” Organic means that the results were not paid for, but obtained by the page having enough influence for the “keywords” that were selected, to show at the top of the results list.
So how do search engines determine what to show at the top? How do they determine relevancy?
Every search engine has its own unique algorithms or unique ways of calculating what to put at the top. That’s why searching on Google may give you different results than searching on Bing.
But there are things we know will factor in:
- How many other pages link into the site? If other pages think this page is important enough to link to, it must be important!
- Are the keywords that someone searched for, highly relevant to the page? Remember the spiders have crawled the site and they are looking at things on the page like how often the keyword is repeated on the page (keyword density), whether the page has optimized metatags (HTML markup that is seen by the spiders, but not seen on the page), and look for the names of images, page title, and even the domain of the name itself.
In the image below, the user has searched for “makeup deals.”
Above, you can see that practicing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, brings www.MakeupDealOfTheDay.com to third place when someone searches for “makeup deals” on Google.
MARS utilized SEO techniques to get Makeup Deal of the Day to the top and we can do the same for you.
Getting to the Top: Page Rank
Some things to build page rank include:
- Having quality content that people want to read (and don’t forget the content will also be indexed by search engines!)
- Having links to the pages of the site from other sites that are related. (So a link from a page about automotive parts to a makeup site won’t do the makeup site much good. But a link from a page about eyeshadow would increase the page rank.)
- Keep pages relatively short and stick to one or two topics.
- Include words on the page that might be linked to a user search
- Make sure each page is accessible by at least one text link or url.
- Images are not as well indexed as text. Though you can use some additional HTML to help, important words should be in text for ease of indexing by the spiders.
Marketing and Research Services understands how search engines work and we understand how to get you found on the Internet. Let us work with you to create and implement a strategic Internet marketing plan for your business.
Top Tips for Using Twitter for Business
Posted by Kayla in social media, social media marketing (SMM) on February 11, 2011
Which of these statements are true?
a) Twitter is a way to connect with potential customers
b) Twitter is a great way to advertise
c) Twitter is like standing in a big room filled with people who are all talking, but no one is listening
d) Twitter should be used to build relationships
e) all of the above
Using Twitter for business, can be a baffling endeavor. The first times I logged in, I felt like I was standing in a corner of the room, talking to myself.
I asked questions, but no one answered.
I posted ads and sales for an ecommerce site, but it seemed like no one cared.
An online acquaintance sent me a DM (Direct Message) and told me to watch out before I got reported for spamming.
I hate spam. I wasn’t trying to spam, I was just clueless.
It took me awhile to get my Twitter “sea legs.” So I’m going to share what I learned.
Top Tips for Using Twitter for Business
- Find Twits (people on Twitter), who are interested in your category. For example, I do some work for a company called Makeup Deal of the Day. I can find people interested in makeup by searching www.twitter.com for “makeup”, “Sephora”, “cosmetics”, or I can search for various brands of makeup.
I can also find top Twitter influencers by using a service like wefollow.com. Just enter the term you’re interested in, and find out who’s following your top influencer for the term, and follow along.
http://wefollow.com/twitter/
Follow the people who follow your influencers. Some number of them will follow you back. - When you get Twitter followers, greet them! Send them a DM, thanking them for the follow. Introduce yourself and make a brief statement about your value proposition. Remember that you only have 140 characters to make your pitch!
In the Makeup Deal scenario, I might tweet something like, “thanks for the follow! If you love makeup bargains, visit us at www.MakeupDealOfTheDay.com.” - Make your Tweets personal! Engage with your followers. Look at their profile. Do you see anything interesting that you can comment on? Do they have a blog that’s relevant to your topic? Maybe you can invite them to be a guest blogger on your web site. Or maybe they will let you guest blog on theirs. Or maybe you can do a co-promotion with them.
- Use Twitter to Engage Your Customers! Don’t just tweet a bunch of advertisements. Tweet things that are relevant to your target market. Be a resource! If you just wrote a great blog article on a relevant topic, tweet a url to it. If you read something written by someone else that your followers will find interesting, pass that on in a tweet.
- Pass the love around! Many people on Twitter are trying to sell things, and that includes people in your target market. When you help them accomplish their goals on Twitter, they will do their best to help you with yours.
Feel free to RT (retweet) for them.
Give them a shout out when it’s time for #FF (Friday Follow is the day you can tell everyone who is following you, who else they should be following. Pass their names around and they are more likely to tell their friends about you too.)
We’ll have more tips for Twitter in an upcoming article on Twitter clients.
Managing Your Web Presence
Posted by Kayla in internet marketing, social media, social media marketing (SMM) on February 8, 2011
Managing Your Web Presence – A Tale of Two Businesses
There are no “one size fits all” solutions for managing your internet presence or implementing an Internet Marketing Plan. An effective plan will take your business needs and goals into consideration.
Let’s take two examples:
| DUI Lawyer
This is a business that serves a local region. Business likely comes through referral and word of mouth, or through search results. |
Online Jewelry Store
Site Map This is a business that is not limited by geographic region. |
| Relationship building is less relevant. Hopefully a DUI lawyer won’t have ongoing, long-term relationships with their clients! | Relationship building is highly relevant. Even for an online business, people still want to buy from people. Relationship selling is important even in the Internet age. |
| Online community building is irrelevant for similar reasons. Social Media Marketing including Facebook, Twitter, message boards, are probably not the best use of time or money. | Online community building can be relevant to anything that people are passionate about. Communities can be built around jewelry fashion, celebrity spotting with jewelry, or the latest news on famous jewelry designers.
Social Media Marketing utilizing Twitter, Facebook, message boards, will increase customer engagement, drive traffic, and provide a noticeable ROI. |
| Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click campaigns will drive traffic to the site. | Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click will drive traffic to the web site. |
| On site testimonials can build confidence in the services that are offered. | On site testimonials may boost confidence in the timeliness of shipping or the quality of products. But other measures to inspire confidence, such as the Trust-E mark may work as well or better, along with return policies. |
| Site Content can build confidence in the services that are offered by demonstrating expertise. Quality content will also boost traffic from search engines. | Site Content can help boost search engine traffic. Engaging content can be used to help build community. |
Internet Marketing Strategy
It’s obvious that the two companies above will have entirely different needs. One size doesn’t, and can’t fit all. Even the parts that do overlap, need to be approached differently.