Economy Blues affecting your Marketing Budget?

Don’t get discouraged because of the economy. Marketing in an uncertain or now, dangerous economy calls for some very thoughtful strategies. When money is tight is not the time to give up marketing altogether, but scaling back on banner advertising and big branding campaigns may be in your bottom line’s best interest. However, don’t give up completely. Online Marketing Experts recommend focusing more on local search and reputation management. What can you do as a business owner to improve your ranking?

#1 – Mind Your Content

Make sure your content is quality, you say what you do and you have accurate and good information on your website!

#2 – Build Your inbound Links!

I preach and preach and you are starting to listen (I think). Build your inbound links. Write an article, comment on a Forum, create a blog. Everything you do to get your name (and your company’s name) out there on the web – of course linking back to your site – can only help you! Don’t forget to link it back to your site!!!

#3 – Get active on Your Marketing

Many site owners can’t afford to hire someone like me to help them with their website marketing. In this economy, it’s understandable. Marketing is the untangible expense and the first to be dropped in many cases. However, a good business person knows, you have to continue to market or you will not continue to bring in business. Just because you had to cut your maketing manager doesn’t mean you should stop your efforts altogether. Many online marketing techniques only cost you time. So get out there and pound the keyboard. I’ll get you started.

See there what I just did? I sent you a Newsletter, you clicked on a link and I got you to visit my blog. (Unless of course there are other online marketing forces at work here and you stumbled across my blog inadvertently). Newsletters are a great way to offer information in exchange for a click. If you have something to say that would be helpful to others, send it to them in a Newsletter, or an informational email!

Another great resource is the Webmaster Help Center on Google. Check it out. Analytical tools, advice, even a blog! That will keep you busy for a while, but remember to come back for more tips and tricks on boosting your site. Until then

Cheers
Colleen

Easiest Way to Get Listed in Google

I love my iPhone. There are so many things about it that I love, but my favorite thing is Maps. The other day I was out spending the afternoon with my daughter and we wanted to get some sushi. We weren’t in our own neighborhood so we didn’t know where to go. I clicked on maps, typed ’sushi’ into the search and tada! At least 20 little red pins marked Sushi restaurants in and around the city we were in. I tried this when I got home and noticed that, sadly, my favorite Sushi stop wasn’t listed. Why?

What most people do know is that these business locations are showing up more and more often in searches. What they don’t know is that Google Maps locations are created by the business owners themselves. Getting your business listed in Google Maps is free, easy, and immediate. Why wouldn’t you take advantage?

All you do is go to http://www.google.com click on Maps. On the left hand side you will see a link: “Put your business on Google Maps’. Do it!

Basic Tips for Successful Indexing

Rule #1 – Make sure your content is accessible by the Search Engines. Sites in Frames, Flash, or some Dynamic content may not be reachable by the webcrawlers. In addition, the spiders can’t follow graphic or javascript links. The best way to ensure that the spiders crawl from page to page is to have plain HTML (text) hyperlinks on your pages. I recommend plenty of crosslinking of text from page to page as well as basic HTML links at the bottom of every page.

Rule #2 – Submit only 1 page per day. The search engines do not like submit tools that submit your site automatically. Website owners can get overzealous and submit 3-4 pages at a time to each of the engines. Some of the Search Engines will detect an automatic submit and ignore it. This is counterproductive to getting your site indexed, so submit only 1 page per day and wait 2-3 months before doing it again.

Rule #3 – Make sure the content on the page is related to the keywords submitted, as well as those placed in the title tags and description tags. You no longer need to use the same keyword 3-4 times on a page, density no longer applies, it’s quality that counts. If your content is relative to the words you are wanting to index, you will have more success with the Search Engines, especially with Google.

Rule #4 – Implement a backlinking strategy. A successful backlinking strategy is critical to the indexing of your site. See Backlinking & Blogs for a great backlinking suggestion. Another quality backlinking tactic would be submitting articles relative to your business (with links back to your site of course) in quality ezines.

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Happy Indexing!

Can Flash be Optimized for the Search Engines

Optimizing Flash for the Search Engines – Can it be Done?

Yes, it can be done, although not easily. Yes it will cost you, tremendously. Get out your checkbook.

Since it’s inception Flash has been the popular medium of choice for cutting edge, hip web design. Yes, it looks cool and given a you have a really good designer, you may even end up with a very functional and intuitive Flash website. I will not deny that I myself, back in the beginning, was easily seduced by the Flash website. I was amazed at the movement and the presentation, that was in the beginning. Now I view Flash as more of an annoyance. Flash designers like to make you wait to unravel their presentation, and often times will hide the buttons, making it a treasure hunt to find the contact page.

Is it necessary? Not usually, but I have had clients set in stone about designing their site in Flash. Compromising practicality and marketability for a really nifty button that makes a cool sound when you click it. After the dust settles and the website is done, most business people come back to their senses and want their site to be optimized and marketable. There are SEO marketers who may take you on, but many won’t touch it, telling you it can’t be done.

My advice? I recommend a nicely marketable site optimized for the search engines with a Flash enhancement, if you must. It’s easier to market, easier to keep fresh and up to date. In the end, once you’ve seen the Flash, you’re over it. Functionality usually wins out over movement when it comes to a web page. In the end, your main objective should be getting more visitors to your site.

How Do Search Engines Index Your Site

In order to understand how to better market your site, you must understand how the Search Engines index your site.

As defined by Wikipedia: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Now the search engines send out spiders or webcrawlers to evaluate and index your site. The Algorithmic method mentioned above is constantly evolving and changing with the sophistication of the web. In order to stay in the game, you need to be aware of the bare basics required, and keep abreast of new marketing concepts as they evolve.

The basics or good practices in SEO are as follows:

Have a keyword or keyphrase in your URL. For example, if you search on “shop wine online” you will see that the 8th listing is wineshoponline.com which has all three of the keywords we searched on.

Put your top keyword / keyphrase in your title tag – your title tag doesn’t have to make sense to your visitor, that’s what the page content is for, the higher you rank a keyword, the closer to the beginning of your title tag it should be.

Make sure the same keyword / keyphrase is in the page content on your page, and make sure the content is relevant to the keyword or keyphrase.  Density or the number of times the actual word appears on the page is not important. What is important is that it is CLEAR that the page content is about the keyword.

Text links are crucial – to send the spiders onward to the rest of your site, you will need text links. Web Spiders can’t follow graphic links, so if all your links are graphic buttons, the spiders will have nowhere to go and will leave your site, possibly without indexing it properly. Highlight the keywords in your text and have them link to other parts of your site as well. E.G. if you are selling clothing and one of your keywords is T-shirts, have this link to the T-shirts page on your site.

Create a Description Meta Tag – The search engines will index this description as their summary data on the list. If you don’t have a description tag, the spiders will index whatever content it finds, and sometimes this can hurt you. A well written description will give the humans a proper idea of what they will find on your site, which will entice them to visit.

Although these practices alone will not get you listed high in the search engines, they are a general foundation of good practices to get you on the road there. So pay attention to what your web designer is doing and make sure these basics are in place when you start your Internet marketing campaigns.

Backlinking & Blogs

The question I get asked most often regarding website marketing is “How do I get listed high in Google?” That’s a really good question, after all, Google is the number one search engine, who wouldn’t want to be listed high in Google? My answer is simple, Google is like High School, it’s all about popularity and one of the best ways to become popular is backlinking and one of the newest ways to backlink is a blog.

So what is backlinking you ask? Simply put, it is when other websites link to your web site. Backlinking is important not just with Google, but with all the search engines. It means other people know who you are and think you are cool. But it’s not how many know you, it’s who you know and the search engines not only count the number of sites linking to you, but they also qualify these sites. You see, the search engines use an algorithm to evaluate the quality of incoming links. This includes the page rank of the linking site, the content, the site (or blog in this case) the linked text, and a whole host of additional criteria, to determine the value of that link to the search engine, which is kept under lock and key by the search engines. What does this mean? It means, you don’t just want anyone linking into your site, you want the right kind of site with quality content and the right type of link. You want an informed, highly read and regarded blogger!

The Right Blog for your Backlink

You want your backlinks to use the keyword you are optimizing for. For example if your online store, wineshoponline.com, sells wine, and you are campaigning to sell a particular wine such as “a 1990 Kenwood Artist Series Cabernet Sauvignon“, you’d want a wine enthusiast to blog about your Cabernet and link to your site including the keyword or keyphrase in their link. (Much like I’ve done above.)

Now, the wine enthusiast’s blog has great content on wine (we double checked, therefore we know) so that link will have more authority to a search engine then say, my little blog here, (which may still drive traffic, but won’t be held in as high esteem) therefore making that link more authoritative. The more quality sites you get linking to you, the higher you rank for your keywords.

So how do you find the right kind of site? Search for your keyword/keyphrase on the search engines and look at the top listing blogs. You’ll want to get as many of these to link to you as possible. Just send them an email and ask them to link one of your keywords (in their content on their blog) to your site featuring the same content. Bloggers tend to be accommodating so give it a try!

Backlinks to be Wary of

Stay away from the wrong kinds of sites. Many sites are actually penalized by the search engines and you don’t want your site associated with them. This includes:

• Paid Links – The search engines are on to this and are actually penalizing people who do it. I’m not talking about AdWords or PPC (oh no… not another acronym) which are totally safe, but carry no link juice anyway.
• Link Farms – Links within ACTUAL content on the page look the most natural to search engines. So if it’s just a page of links going to any which site, the search engines find no relevance and won’t count them.
• Link Swaps – Trading or reciprocal linking is dead. These links cancel each other out. In the eyes of the search engines, doing this is a sign that your content must not be very good. If you have good content, people will link to it.

In conclusion, Backlinking does take a little legwork on your part, but the payoff is worth it. So happy searching and here’s to quality backlinking, Cheers!