What Works Marketing

“One out of five searches on Google are related to location, and we want to make sure that businesses are able to be found and put their best foot forward,” says Google Maps, Earth, and Local VP John Hanke.

Place Pages are the pages for business listings that are found in Google local searches. They contain relevant information about a business from various places on the web, such as reviews and images, as well as other info the business puts up after claiming their listing.

Google Places is what Google says is “just the beginning of what’s to come from our efforts to make Google more local.”

Once you’ve created your listing you will be asked to verify your listing. You can verify your listing by receiving a pin via phone or by havening a direct mail piece sent to you.

Getting Ranked for Local Searches

Google local results are ranked primarily based on relevance, geographic distance and other factors. According to Google’s help center, business that are farther away are sometimes ranked higher than closer businesses because they appear to be more relevant to the search. Google doesn’t provide any other details about their ranking algorithm and you can’t request or pay for better rankings, but there are several things that you can do to improve your rankings.

Learn how to your business to Google Places

Apr 27th by admin

Continue Reading

Focus on Content and Code

While it is tempting start building traffic for you site, I suggest taking a different approach and say start with your content. After all, why make all the effort to drive people to your site if, when they get there, it’s a letdown? You’ve got to deliver value and make the most of each visitor. So let’s start by analyzing the site you’re driving traffic to in terms of content and code.

Give Your Customers Value

Writing good content for your site is about giving your customers value. By providing true, relevant content, you are doing two things:

1. Respecting the time and energy of both your customers and non-customers by allowing them to quickly judge the relevancy of your site to their needs.
2. Providing your customers and/or readers with a good value for their time when they are reading your site, blog, or newsletter.

Giving site visitors relevant and non-disposable content with a long shelf life has many additional benefits for you as well, including:

• increasing your readership.
• getting people to link and/or talk about you.
• creating “stickiness”, which is getting readers to come back.
• building a brand for your company.
• marketing your company as a respectable, trustworthy source.
• promoting yourself as an intelligent and sincere person.

Format Your Content

Formatting your content is an important part of engaging your readers and encouraging them to read on. It’s not just the content of your website, newsletter, or blog that matters: the formatting of this content determines how much your content is read and absorbed. Current research using eyetracking software shows us exactly how visitors read and scan through material to determine which items are worth their time. A page with a huge block of text is an eyesore to anyone trying to read it. Breaking up your pages and formatting your content is crucial to maximizing your site’s readability.

After writing your content using the hallmarks of good copywriting, follow these guidelines to format your content for the web:

• Use bullet points
  Bullet points are a great way to list your ideas in a concise format.
• Edit your material for relevance and brevity
  Don’t create an emotional attachment to your business writing—snip at will to keep your information on task!
• Use typography and font hierarchy
  In your style guides or stylesheets, designate different font treatments for headings, subsections, body text, and links.
• Write, rewrite, and really focus on your headings and subheadings
  Your section titles can make or break the information that comes after them. Being precise and clear will help you to get more readers for the rest of your information.
• Write in an easy-to-understand, conversational tone
  Using too much technical jargon or writing text that doesn’t flow will only help you lose your readers.
• Increase your line height
  Increasing the line height in your code increases the white space between lines and makes the text easer to read.
• Break up your text with paragraphs and punctuation
  Providing content in bite-sized amounts can be easier for a visitor to process and absorb than long-winded, endless paragraphs. Don’t be shy about breaking things up with punctuation and new paragraphs. 

To learn more about creating quality content and writing for the web, check out these links:

• Dartmouth Web Teaching Articles: Writing for the Web
• Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion by Dr. Jakob Nielsen
• Scannable Content from ProBlogger
• Web Writing Basics
• Writing Articles from A List Apart
• Writing on the Web by Dr. Jakob Nielsen
• Writing Well for the Web: Webreference’s Quick and Easy Tips for Non-writers

Add Interactivity

By using widgets, you can add functionality to your site to increase user interactivity without any programming knowledge. Widgets also allow you to add additional value to your site through content and other information pieces, such as headlines, news, audio and video, and games.

Create Clean Code

A well-built site has benefits for both your readers and search engines. For your readers, a site built according to web standards:

• makes your site accessible to those with disabilities, those using non-standard browsers such as browsers on mobile devices and those using browsers other than Internet Explorer, which represents roughly 40% of the market.
• considers the visitor first and engages your customer in the content.

For the search engines, a quality web site:

• helps the crawler-bots to find all of your content through linking.
• helps the search engine index all of your content properly for search purposes.

Make Your Site Search-Engine Friendly

Here are some coding and content rules to follow when making your site search-engine friendly:

• Use CSS wisely
  Use CSS (stylesheets) to replace text with an image if it contains important information, or at least use alt tags on your images, so that search engines will not skip over your graphics. (Better yet: don’t put important information in your graphics!)
• Be careful with JavaScript
  Avoid using Javascript to display text or menus. Search engines will not be able to follow these links, and will end up only partially indexing your site.
• Submit your site to the top search engines
  See Step 5 in this series to learn how. You can also go a step farther by creating a site map of your site and giving it to the major search engines so they can index you.
• Write for humans first and computers second
  Optimize your site for search engines as search engine algorithms get more and more complex, relevant content will score higher, and sites employing “search engine tricks” will score lower. This is why you should use natural language when writing your content.

Mar 11th by admin

Continue Reading

One of the questions I always get whenever I talk with another SEO is what tools I you use. Here’s list of some FireFox plugins that can provide some useful information.

Web Developer

Use full for seeing attributes with HTML quickly and easily including meta tags, alt tags ect.

SEO for Firefox

This tool from SEO Book adds further information to Google and Yahoo search results by telling you how and why particular websites are ranking.

Among the information listed is Page Rank, links from .edu sites, links from Yahoo Directory, domain age, and more. A useful tool.
SEOpen

Over 20 different SEO metrics from back links on Yahoo and Google from archived pages, to whois to your checking robots.txt.
SeoQuake

Like SEO Book’s add-on, SeoQuake makes research easier by providing information such as Page Rank, number of links, links from social media sites etc. Users can have the SEO information they want to view displayed in a toolbar.

KGen

This keyword generator allows you to see which keywords are strong on any webpage you visit, Ideal for checking out what your competitors are doing.

Link Evaluator

This tool automatically follows the links on a web pages, assessing the response of each URL.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar

This performs most of the above SEO tasks in one toolbar. Includes keyword finder, link popularity tool, Page Rank, AdWords generator and more, with more than 30 SEO tools.

yExplore –

Allows easy right click access to Yahoo Site Explorer info.

What tools do you use?

Jul 09th by admin

Continue Reading

Trust and credibility are crucial on your home page. But a landing page has a different set of challenges.

Many B2B sites have a big bold and beautiful call to action placed well above the fold at the top of your screen. But most fail to sell the prospect on why they should sign up or take action. You need to entice the visitor by telling them exactly what is in it for them, build trust by giving them cold hard facts, include specific numbers and include testimonials from happy buyers. Don’t ever include other offers or ads on your landing page you don’t want to distract your audience nor do you want to lose trust by appearing scrappy or spammy.

You want your landing page to be streamlined and to capture the the prospect’s important information quickly. But be careful about asking your prospects too much too soon. If requesting lots of information care make your prospects nervous and scare them away. If your require detail information break your lead capture into sections capturing portions as you go. Start with minimal contact information such as a email address and name and ask for more details as you build the relationship.

Almost every landing page should include some photos with people that will connect with your prospects.

Photos improve conversion rates online because prospects relate to the people in the photo. When using photos, you can get more conversions using these techniques:
Try images of real people who resemble the average customer.
Make sure they portray a happy positive emotion.
Use images that are looking in the right direction at the call to action.
Don’t amputate! Prospects get agitated by photos that appear to amputate body parts.

Finally the most important part of developing a landing page is to test and test again. Only your vistors and prospects can tell you accurately what is the best combination on your landing page.

Jun 30th by admin

Continue Reading

Simple straight forward hierarchy of what elements you should include on every page on your site to ensure that it is optimized for the search engines.

SEO Cheat Sheet

Apr 19th by admin

Continue Reading

As a professional, you need a professional looking website.

Remember when everyone who was anyone had a business card, and that was the common currency of business introductions?  While business cards haven’t gone away, you’ve probably heard – with increasing frequency – just check out my website at…. Another major trend for those who do carry business cards is to only include only a name and website address without any other details. Now more than ever, websites are being used as the main promotional vehicle for businesses.

Where to Start

Before you dive into creating your perfect website, give some careful thought to what you hope to accomplish. What are your goals for the site? Do you wish to sell products on your site or just provide information? Who is your target audience? What search terms do you want to be found for?

It’s also a good idea to look at your competitions sites and to make a list of features you find appealing. Also look outside your industry and make a list of sites that you like the reasons why.

Location, Location, Location

Everyone wants a great piece of real estate, both in the real world and the online world. Of course at this point, it seems all the good names are taken especially if you want a “.com” address.

Try to get a domain name that’s relatively short, easy to spell and relates to your business. Feel free to get creative. Start with a list of keywords you would like to incorporate and try variations while looking for a viable option. You can check availability and register a domain name with a registrar such as GoDaddy.com, Register.com or many others.

Gather up the pieces

By now you’re probably starting to get a pretty good idea of what you want and it’s a great time to start gathering up the pieces that you would like to include. I recommend creating a new folder either physical or digital that you can start collecting the pieces in. Include your logo, photos, colors, and any previous marketing materials you think might be helpful. Gathering more information now will make the design process easier later.

Also start jotting down thoughts about what you would like each individual page to say.

Planning your site

It’s important to keep the site’s organization as simple as possible, even if your business is complex. Your website should provide access to everything your customers or potential customers need without overwhelming the visitor.

Start by creating a site map that defines which pages you will actually need and how they fit together. This will drive the navigation that you build into the site’s design. Then sketch out what you think you want the site to look like, start thinking about color and other design considerations.

You’ll also want to start giving some thought to how you plan to use the site. Will you be changing the content frequently? Will you be adding new products on a regular basis? How will your visitors contact you? ect. You will also want to give some thought to how your will find your site. Unfortunately the saying “Build it and they will come” isn’t always true. If you want to be found in the search engines for a list of specific keywords add that to your plan as well.

Plan to Action

Now that you have a clear concept of what you want/need, the look and feel of your site, and how users will interact with it we’re ready to put your plan into action.

One option is to have a professional web developer put your site together for you. This option will provide you with the most flexibility with the site functionality and design. This is probably the best option for you if you have no prior experience in creating websites and acronyms like SEO, HTML, CSS, and CMS are completely foreign. This is also a good option if you just don’t have the time to develop the site yourself. Before choosing a web developer make sure that they can meet all of the requirements you outlined in your plan.

Another option is to use a website building tool that allows you to customize a template and build your site yourself. These range from free to a small one time fee to an ongoing monthly fee. Most domain registrars will have a solution that will help you get up and running. But beware these do limit the amount of flexibility you have with your site in the future.

Going Live

After your site is created you’ll need a place to put it. A full service web-design firm can help you get a hosted account and publish your site. Otherwise you’ll need to perform these steps yourself. You’ll also need a place to host your website. Look for a hosting service that guarantees reliability, offers competitive pricing, and the features you need often this can be done through your domain name registrar as well. Beware of free hosting solutions that display ads on your site or limited functionality.

Once your site is uploaded it’s time to go to market, and start promoting your site. Hopefully your site was created with optimization for the search engines in mind and you will start generating traffic almost immediately. If you haven’t already you’ll want to install a web analytics tool to measure the performance of your website.

In a few days of going live check and see how you’re doing in the rankings for specific phrases like you company name. Be patient but if you can’t find your site anywhere in the major search engines there may be a problem with your site.

Mar 18th by admin

Continue Reading

The presence of the internet is no longer limited to a desktop computer in your office or home or a bulky laptop. Internet enable phones, PDAs, netbooks, and even portable music devices are giving consumers access to more information than ever before. By the time a consumer is ready to buy they are much further along the sales process and they have had very little direct interaction with you or your company.

The dynamics of marketing has changed and marketers now have an opportunity to reach seekers of information rather than pushing information on to everyone. It also means that having an active web presence is more important than ever.

Here are some tips to build your online presence

Tip #1 – On Site Search Engine Optimization

Almost anyone can create a website these days. But don’t stop at just having an attractive looking site, make sure you can be found in the search engines. Here are some of the basics:

1) Page Title (in the top bar of your browser) is very important in telling search engines what your site is about

2) URLor website address can contain keywords that will be picked up by search engines

3) Headings with H1, H2, H3 HTML tags are seen by search engines as more important than other text on your site

4) Page text is also somewhat important, especially bold text

5) Description – a brief description of what your site is about when you are listed in search engine results, for the reader’s (not search engine’s) benefit

6) Keywords – designated in your site’s HTML code, keywords give search engines a general idea about the content of your site

7) Links – Each link from another site counts as a “vote” with the search engine.

Tip #2 – Start a Blog

Blogging is a great way to get more traffic from you target audience. Search engines like the fresh content and a blog is an easy way to ad fresh content to your site regularly. People also like to interact with people, a blog is a great place to demonstrate your corporate culture and humanize your brand. Blogging will also allow you to engage your customers in conversation and build brand loyalty.

Tip #3 – Use Web Forms

Once you’ve generated some traffic through your website and SEO efforts, start capturing who your visitors are and asking them for their permission to send them more information about your product and services.

Mar 13th by admin

Continue Reading

Feb 26th by admin

Continue Reading

All marketers have the same goal for their paid search campaigns: increase conversions and keeping costs down. If you’re like most marketers you’ve probably seen an increase your cost per click over the last year and find yourself spending more and getting less.   Or, like many of us, maybe your performance is fine but your budgets have been slashed, forcing you to produce the same results with less spend.

Improve Your Quality Score. Lower quality ads require higher minimum CPC bids, so it’s always good idea to do a little quality score sculpting. So test different keyword match types can help lower your impressions, increase your click through rate, improve quality score. In Google, try testing multiple match types. In Yahoo, adjust advanced match settings.

1)  Make sure you keywords are broken down into adgroups that only contain keywords that are very similar.

2) Make your ad text relevant to the keywords in the group, and create a specific, compelling call to action by preparing the searcher for the end conversion, such as “Buy keyword today and save 20%.”

Eliminate irrelevant traffic. When you’re paying per click, you want only relevant traffic. Many campaigns are hindered by irrelevant traffic. You can often reduce irrelevant traffic drastically in just few quick steps that will ensure that your ad doesn’t come up in search results under irrelevant terms.

1)  Identifying negative keywords. The best way to find negative keywords is to look at your search query report and create a list of negative keywords. Then decide if they should be at the applied at the campaign level or the adgroup level.

2)  Make match type adjustments. Change your match type from broad to phrase or exact match. Start with your keywords that have the most spend and impressions.

Optimize ad copy. To keep out unqualified traffic, you have to be specific. Remember you only want to drive quality traffic and not just clicks. If the majority of your traffic is irrelevant, it doesn’t help you. Including a call to action can be an excellent tool. Be sure to create a specific, compelling call to action by preparing the searcher for the end conversion, such as “Buy widgets today and save 20%.”

Improve your landing pages. Have consistency between your ad and the landing page. This can be one of the easiest fixes, but it is often overlooked by search managers. Make your shopping cart easy to use and goals easy to achieve. Remember you lose people after each and every click.

Test. Don’t forget to test! Test offers, calls-to-action, forms, design, landing pages, new ideas-everything.

Feb 09th by admin

Continue Reading

Dec 26th by admin

Continue Reading