Archive for Search Engine Marketing
The Logic Of Internal Linking – 15 SEO Steps to Web Design Heaven
Credit: AlbertoSantander
Live Internet Marketing recently hosted a short presentation by Rez Sarmadi, one of their resident Marketing Gurus, and Co-Founder of Sarbro Solutions about methods of internal ranking that will greatly help your Google Rankings. I was very excited to hear Rez’s presentation, and it delivered well beyond expectation.
1) Begin Your Internal Link Strategy When You Design the Site - According to Rez, Internal linking doesn’t start once the site is created, but rather is a part of the actual site design. The best time to begin internal linking is during the planning stage of the website.
PPC is “Not About The Ranking” - 7 Ways to Convince Your Client
Credit to Foraggio Fotographic
As the online marketing manager at SARBRO Solutions, I deal with some small business owners who advertise online. Often enough, they are in very competitive markets, where there are millions of searches a month, and the Cost per Click is between $2-$5. Similar to the “Rankings are Dead” argument Bruce Clay makes in regards to SEO, it’s not about the rankings, it’s about the conversions.
But it’s not only small business owners that have this misconception, CEO’s and others who are responsible for the budget, often have an ego issue, “why am I not number one on the Search Engines”? They will obsessively check their rankings to see if they are number one, convinced that their decrease in leads is due to not being in the first place on Google.
At one point, I was working at a company where we were spending a couple hundred thousand a month on Paid Search. At that point, while we were dominant on the search engines on paid search, our cost was consistently going up, and not only that, our biggest competitor consistently outranked us. The CEO was convinced that if we would be in position number one, we’d do much better. Of course, we adjusted our bid, raised it to $15/click, our budget burnt out by the end of the morning, and we spent an extra $10,000 on leads we could have gotten for cheaper.
The 3 Series Punch to Marketing your website and Blog
3 Steps - Credit to #freelance
Many people want to just start their online marketing campaign - be it SEO, Paid search or Social Media Marketing, without doing any previous marketing analysis. However it’s much more important to have your business plan down pat when you are marketing online, over when you are doing offline marketing.
To give you an understanding why, I’ll give you 3 different “case studies” with a lawyer who is trying to grow their business. They are an experienced attorney.
The Online Marketing 101 to Web Analytics - 3 Basic Ways to Use Web Analytics Tools
Web Analytics is a critical tool to understanding your online business. Whether you are simply running a blog, trying to generate leads from your website, or doing ecommerce, web analytics tools are critical to your success. So what can web analytics do for you?
- It can tell you what keywords the search engines find relevant to your website. This is a pretty basic way of using web analytics, and that is to see what keywords are driving traffic to your website. You can then decide whether to continue focusing on those topics that are driving traffic to your site, or you can decide to focus on other more relevant topics.
8 Ways To Market Your Music Online
- Credit To Jrossol
Being a musician - even an established label during the digital age can be a big challenge. When alot of music is being streamed online, or given away - or downloaded on torrents, you would think it’s even more challenging.
However, the opposite is true. There are many more ways to allow other people to listen and buy your music without having been already signed. You can sell your music digitally, and get up to 95% of what the revenue is. Your cost to create an album and distribute it is much lower. You can engage with users, and create fans without having an expensive PR team.
In short, it’s a great time. Although there is alot of opportunity, it can be overwhelming at times to create your online marketing strategy. So we’ve decided to give you one.
9 Firefox Plugins for an Online Marketer
Firefox is Hot
Firefox is a very useful tool for anyone who does online marketing. You can do alot of things within the browser, as well as get alot of information using these plugins. Some of the things I use Firefox Addons for:
- Post directly to Twitter from twitterfox
- Write blog posts
- Do Competitive research (learn how many pages a site has, how many visitors a website has, and more)
The List of Essential Firefox Plugins:
The 12 Most Useful Social Bookmarking & Autoposting Tools for Your Blog
As bloggers, we’re always trying to encourage our readers to post our blogs to one of the many social bookmarking services… be it digg, delicious, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon or one of the myriad others. There are many different wordpress plugins for different social sites. The problem is that your blog ends up cluttered with all of those buttons, and it really gets annoying.
The solution has been the plugins that allow you to post to any or many of the social networks. Here’s an overview of all of the ones that I’ve found (with some of my lovely comments to boot). One of the most popular players - sharethis, has received $15 million dollars in funding!
Online Video for Small Businesses - Can I afford it?
It all started with Youtube and Viral marketing. It spread to personal multimedia on websites. It continued with Rovion… For $3,000 you could have a professional nudge on your site bugging all your repeat visitors (but it looks cool). Microsoft’s bought it, and servicemagic has as well. The problem is that it’s really expensive. But, we’re nice people, and we want small business owners to benefit as well.
Want to put video on your site? Here’s a couple of resources:
Do You Follow the Nofollow? Get the Story - and The Linkjuice!
The dofollow - nofollow debate has been a topic that was beaten into the dirt… Here’s a little rerun of some of the story.
Issue:
The concept of Google’s page-rank algorithm is based on the structure used to rank the authority of academic articles. The assumption is that any academic article that is quoted by other sites is more authoritative. Google applies that to websites, and assumes that the more links coming in to a site, the more relevant it is to the keywords that it’s linked into with.
Say What?
Mark Cook over at Digerati Marketing compares the internet to a flower show.
USA Today’s Steve Strauss Encourages Small Business Owners to have Blogs
John Janstch alerted me to an article in the USA Today online that adresses whether business owners should have blogs.
Steve Strauss gives 5 reasons a small business owner should have a blog:
- You help build a sense of community - in other words, you build a relationship with the customer, so they see you as a real person… not just a webpage
- They allow you to plug products
- They help with SEO - I use the blog here solely for SEO (as well as to get new clients - I’ll get to the plug at the end
)
17 Useful Wordpress SEO and other plugins
- All in One SEO Pack - This is an absolutely vital plugin for every blog that you have. This allows you to change your Title, description and keyword metatags on each blog post to make them unique, as well as to make a default home page title and description. I credit this plugin with about 30% of the credit for my rankings on some of my keywords.
- AutoMeta - This tag kind of conflicts with the All-in-one SEO packplugin, as it automatically creates the titles and descriptions. I still have to see how this works with All-in-One SEO pack
The Los Angeles Times Free Local Business Listing
While searching on Google for Los Angeles Business Directories, I found that the LA Times has a free one. I had never heard of it before, and it’s free, so I figured, hey, may as well give it a shot.
If you have a business in Los Angeles, go ahead and post it there.
Top 3 Questions from SmallBusiness Owners About Online Marketing
Local Business Owner Three Biggest Questions about search – and the answers:
1) Do people really search for local services online?
2) Can I afford to get traffic from the internet?
3) Is there anyway to do it if I am not a “computer guy” or on a budget?
The main way to see whether people are searching for your service is to go see how many people search for your business locally, by going to wordtracker and seeing how many people are searching for your service in your area.Here is a screenshot of the amount of people that search for los angeles accountants (a client of mine is a los angeles accountant).
Why is Clever Hack Outranking Yahoo for “hack yahoo fantasy football”?
Joy over at Clever Hack is curious why she is ranking number one for “hack yahoo fantasy football“.
I just did a little research, and I saw that not only is she #1, but number two and three and five are websites that just took her RSS feed!
Getting a little jealous - (hey I want number two and three for my keywords to be filled with my own RSS feeds), I promptly decided to sign up with the same sites that show up for number two and three and five -
Get Rid Of Duplicate Content on your Blog - Gain Ranking
Two weeks ago I went to a conference put on by Jeremy and Anik from PPC Classroom. It was a great networking opportunity. I bumped into Rian Brooklyn, who mentioned an issue of having duplicate content on your home page.
If you have Wordpress in default mode, then you have all of the contents of your first couple of posts on your home page, which makes those pages duplicate content. Not a good thing.
So I looked at how my site is indexed in Google. It wasn’t pretty. Almost none of my individual posts were indexed. Instead, only my categories were indexed. e.g. aboutresultsmarketing.com/marketing_blog/category/google/.
Facebook (Stupidly) Takes the Heat from Moveon, while Yahoo and Ebay laugh to the bank!
So we all know about the Facebook Debacle with Beacon - and the horrible mistakes stupid 24 year olds make (We really do love you Mark Zuckerburg) it’s just that young kids shouldn’t be running $15 billion dollar businesses.
Moveon.org and the EFF have been decrying the privacy issues. As I’ve stated in a previous post, I think that behavioral targeting is inevitable and coming soon. In fact, I wasn’t happy that Mike Morgan from Tacoda was being apologetic about it.
Los Angeles Writers Guild Strike Analysis
Can’t resist putting up a post about this. I live four blocks away from CBS, and see the strikers in front of the studio daily. Especially since Joe Marchesse had to make a post about it on Mediapost.
Here was Joe’s take about the effect of the strike on the industry.
- This would accelerate the search for monetization methods of digital content (OK, I didn’t think of that!)
- Less New TV content - I did think of this one as the big drawback for studios
- Surplus of digital media talent - I’ll pretend I thought of that.
Should an Ecommerce Website Have a Blog?
(Disclaimer: I am extremely biased towards blogs. I have already come to the conclusion that blogs are always beneficial. Consider yourself warned!)
Here are the issues:
- What are the pro’s and con’s of having a blog on your ecommerce site (The Theory)
- What are the other experts in the field saying about having blogs on your ecommerce site
- What are the big guys doing?
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What are the Pro’s and Con’s of having a Blog on your Ecommerce site?
Los Angeles Internet Marketing - A Local Business Directory
As you probably know, getting links to your website is the all important thing in getting better rankings (if you have an optimized website first, that is).
Many people use article directories, press releases, putting blog links on other blogs etc.
As a small business owner, there is a very valuable and often overlooked factor - getting your business listed in the local business directoriesI am in the midst of creating a list of sites to submit your business to, for local marketing. I’ve already mentioned a great resource in the Local Search Optimization post.
Is the LA Times Getting Closer to “Getting It”?
This is a follow up to my first post on the LA Times’s efforts to go “Web 2.0″, after meeting with Eric Ulken at a blogger’s event.
First off, a little disclaimer… My site is ugly, doesn’t convert, and definitely is not “cool”. So I really should have no right to criticize other companies’ efforts to “get it”. Especially since the LA Time site isn’t to badly designed. It has a pretty minimalist design, and very easy to find links.