Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Service

Internet marketing is different from offline world. In real world location is key to success. As long as you got your store in a crowded place – you’re good. On the internet it is all about information, information, information. People care not about you or anyone else. If they want to talk, they want to talk about themselves.

If you are new comer, looking to establish small internet business, please read the article on Internet Scammers first.

Start Your Small Business Internet Marketing with Strong Foundation.

Begin right from the start. You need to keep in mind a number of different factors.

On site marketing. When visitors come, what will prompt them to stay and take out the credit cards / pick up the phone?

Off site internet marketing. Who is going to refer to you, how will people talk about you.

Search engine optimization. Most people are using Google, Yahoo and MSN to find information they need. Can you be found through search engines? There is a special industry that is focused on making sure that your website can be found on search engines.

Email Marketing Campaigns. Once you build an email list, how are you going to take advantage of it to the fullest?

Blogging. Blogging is the new buzz in small business internet marketing world, through which you can deliver news and valuable content. Blogging is also a good way to drive targeted traffic from search engines, social news aggregators, social bookmarking sites, social search engines and get a subscribed user base.

Onsite Internet Marketing Tactics.

Assuming traffic problems are solved. You get plenty. What will make me want to buy from you? How are you better then your competitor? How can I trust you? How do I know you’re not a scammer? Do you offer discounts?

Those are the questions that might be running through the mind of your visitors. You have to make sure you can address them efficiently.

Differentiate. Unless you are very unique business, you probably have a number of established and new competitors, who more or less offer same products/services, at the same prices with the same pitch. You have to differentiate. The easiest way of doing so is by developing a powerful Unique Selling Proposition statement.

Before getting down to selling and writing your smal business site marketing copy study your prospects and find out in detail about them.

Offsite Internet Marketing Strategies.

Assuming your small business site is ready to fly and convert future visitors. Who will be sending additional traffic? From where?

Affiliates come in handy. If your small business involves selling e-products you might be interested in Clickbank affiliate network. The commissions for affiliates may range from 40% to 60%, however they do a wonderful job of increasing exposure and driving additional visitors to you small internet business.

If you are selling merchandize or offer offline services through a website, it is wise to purchase ads on theme specific sites. Avoid banners and popups and go after text based links, since text links do not look like ads. Good descriptions will gain you more visitors.

Directory submissions have a chance of sending you quality traffic as well as acting as ranking boosters on search engines. Consider adding a website to only industry specific directories that reflect the nature of your small internet business.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization Marketing.

Search engine optimization is a practice of making sure that your site shows up among top results when people search with particular keywords. For example, if you sell flowers in Toronto, it is very beneficial for your website to show up for the keyword “toronto flowers” when people search for it. The biggest benefit of search engine optimization is the increased revenues due to high quality traffic. When people search on Google or Yahoo for “toronto flowers” they most likely want to buy flowers in Toronto. If you manage to show your website on the first page your business will gain visitors who are ready to buy. SEO is considered one of the most effective internet marketing strategies, both for large and small businesses.

Search engine optimization exists for as long as the search engines and it can get quite expensive, however cheap SEO internet marketing services do not work. To find out how to pick a good search engine marketing and pricing read SEO fees article.

Email Marketing Campaigns

Do you have a newsletter? If you do, you may want to take advantage of email marketing. Though it isn’t as nearly as effective as it used to be, there are still some revenues to be made from email internet marketing. Just make sure you don’t pitch too hard as you may annoy some people.

Blogging for Small Businesses.

“A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.” - Wikipedia.

Blog can be used to build audiences and build relationships with other bloggers. If you successfully build relationships with other bloggers you stand a high chance of being mentioned on their blogs, whose readers in turn might come to your website or mention you small business on their blogs.

It is a link chain reaction and having a number of qualified blog subscribers can only benefit your small business internet marketing efforts.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to Torontanians!
Let all your goals be achieved.

How does Google work?

Have you ever wondered how does Google work? What stands behind the veil of the fastest growing and the most popular company in the world. Lets crack that nut. Out to get a hammer.

So how does Google Work.

At the heart of Google genius stands a simple concept. Google decides which websites are important by the number of links pointing to that website. Usually the more the better, but not always. That smart G analyzes each and every website pointing to you and if it finds that the site linking has different topics, that link becomes worthless. For example if I sell animal food and a fella by the name of Jon running a site on quantum physics gives me his generous link – I’m out of luck, Google doesn’t care.

This is one of the primary reasons why Google results are so relevant. The logic behind it – if you are good, people will link to you.

Another aspect that Google looks at, is the number of links that link to the website that links to you. Confused? Me too.

Lets pretend for a second there is Bob with a website on physics. Bob links to John. The next step Google is going to do, is look at Bob’s website and analyze what links point to Bob. Lets say that Bob is a prominent scientist with 1000 science sites linking to him. In that case Google is going consider John quite important as well, because Bob with so many links linked to John.

With this example we can say that a link from Bob is going to affect John quite a bit, because Bob has so much link power. If Bob only had 20 links, John’s website would not have been impacted so much.

This concept is called Page Rank.

Page rank is measured in points, from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. With this example we can say that having a link from a website with 1000 quality links - is 10 times better then 20 websites with only a few links, or in another words with low Page Rank.

Page rank is one of the driving forces behind Google genius and it can be said that Page Rank idea made Google founders billionaires.

What Else Does Google look at?

Apart from Page rank and links Google analyzes and dissects websites on many other factors. Google is going to look at things such as headings, text, navigation, alt-tags, filenames, headers, domains and so forth. It will analyze and figure out what in the world your website is about and where it can shove it. Once all pieces are put together Google delivers your website in its search results. It might not show on the first, second or third pages. It might be all the way on 20, 40 and 60, but your website is most likely stored in Googles’ databases.

Whenever Google spiders analyze your website, they take its copy and store it on their servers. This allows Google to quickly show the page and then redirect searchers to the original destination.

Google is a vast mathematical miracle and it works from numerous desktop computers.

Instead of having mainframe computers, Google has thousands of desktops connected together, which inner lock to create advanced server farms. Farms consists of cheap PCs that form giant hard drives. The advantage of such system - it allows Google to replace dead parts without stopping the whole operation.

Here you can watch a very interesting, interactive tutorial on how Google stores the web and how it manages to show exact results in a split of an eye.

Does Google show you any love?

Search engine optimization is a powerful internet marketing technique in terms of getting targeted visitors. However, once people land on your pages, it is up to your content to do the selling.

There is no argument whatsoever – words do the selling. In some rare cases product sells itself on the basis of being extremely unique and rare, but for the most part there is a degree of sales and online marketing that needs to be applied to the prospect. There are many internet marketing techniques involving the structure of the opening page, heading, subheading and content.

Some techniques involve the use of original technology. Today I want to mention a relatively new online marketing technique, which can be effective in a highly specialized niche fields.

Interact with your visitors by talking to them.

When I say talk to visitors, I mean in. A new internet marketing technique which is gaining its ground comes from an American company Sitepal. Sitepal produces virtual people which can talk directly to your visitors and say whatever you want them to say.

This cute little head is fully customizable and will speak predermined text.

There are no restrictions as to what it can say and the quality in terms of pronunciation is superb. The idea behind it, is innovation. There aren’t many websites utilizing such technology, so a share of users will be warmly surprised to hear someone’s voice speaking to them. Of course the “talking head” will not do the selling alone and shouldn’t be the only internet marketing technique, however it may get more people to explore your website and hear the message.

Avatar internet marketing techniques may not work for more high paced environments such as online shops, however it can do quite good in relatively small niche fields.

One thing I loved about it, is the amount of choices in terms of customization. There are numerous heads to pick from: woman, men, smiles, fictional. Most of the elements can be customized, such as the eye color, eyebrows, nose, outfit, background and many more. You also have the ability of uploading your own audio file, which can be a recording of your own voice – thumbs up! If you do not like to talk, there are 8 voices to choose from with American and British accents and 16 different languages(accents vary)

Give them a try, might be the next thing to your higher conversion rate!

One thing you can very successfully do on the internet is monitor your competition. As much as they would like to keep things under the radar – it is perfectly observable and traceable.

Once you know who is competing against you and where they stand, keep a close eye on their actions. Trends do make the difference in offline and online worlds. If they are the first ones to unveil something unique or hot – you better catch up.

Here are some techniques on monitoring your competition online.

Exploring their website is essential, however as you probably already know, you must do it from a strategic perspective of why, how and for who. Knowing exactly their placement and on site marketing strategies is key to doing it better.

On-site is just one piece in a puzzle. They might have some discounts, programs or responses ready to target unsuspecting visitors, but where do they get those visitors from?

Time to investigate their off page referrals.

One of the most effective ways is to explore their inbound links. If someone has a relationship with them, they must be linking to their website. Lets copy the URL and explore the search engines. Do the following.

Copy their address and paste it into:

Google
Yahoo
Microsoft

Make sure to leave out the http://

It is important to do it on all major search engines since their indexes differ, so will the number of incoming links. Study their affiliations one by one. If the linking site includes primarily information, you can take a shot and ask the webmaster to either link you or even better swap the link to yours. If some affiliate programs are in place, analyze them, see if you can get something similar going for your company. The key is to see what competition is doing and counter react with more effective strategies. In some cases it is possible to minimize their impact by directly affecting it.

In terms of search placement and PPC you can try a number of “spy” services which provide valuable intelligence.

Compete
Hitwise

A bit of snooping here and there wouldn’t hurt and though some of the services are pricey, the info very valuable.

Good luck.

Matt cuts has announced ot PubCon that Google will remove subdomains from it’s search results and will treat them as folders.

For example if we search for Google, we would get the following results.

Subdomains highlighted in red will be removed, and will show third party websites. If your website has domain:

yourbrand.com and store under store.yourbrand.com

The store.yourbrand.com will be removed. As searchenigneland.com reports, implications will be momentous on the businesses, since search by brand allows big names to essentially dominate the first page. A good example would be Sony.

Evisibility.com predicted on their blog that Google will substitute for this change with sitelinks, allowing your brand to show on the first place with expanded choice, followed by 3rd party websites below.

Make sure to verify your site with your Google Webmaster Account, so you can control what site links are displayed.

Marty Weintraub has posted a wonderful blog that describes the views of investement community on search optimization companies.

Here is the recap of his post.

The most important factors investors will look to identify the value of the company.

• Current and Past Client List – the bigger the better. Current client list serves as in indicator to future clients.
• Nature of revenues – one time assignment or a recurring project.
• Tools Employed – commercial high grade software, sets apart companies in the eyes of investment community.
• Scalability – can you grow in the areas where you are already successful?
• Management Style.

“The investor wants to be assured that you have the ability to see into the future and be a visionary leader. This factor is particularly important in the SEO/SEM industry because things change so quickly. Competitive positioning is very important to potential suitors. Know who your competitors are and be ready to paint a picture of what your competitive landscape and know your position.”

Regardless of whether your company is looking for an investment or transfer of rights, it is essential to keep in mind factors outlined by Patricia Hall. Succesful business practices require a good grip on all of those elements regardless of current and future plans, be it an SEO company or any other online/offline venue.

Reteuers predicts an overall growth in global advertising to the approximate of 6 %, with internet ad spending to increase more then 69% in three years. If the prediction is correct online advertising will force out magazines out of the 3rd spot, taking 11.5% of global promotion budgets.

“In terms of adspending by medium, the Internet was tipped to nearly double its share of global spend between 2006 and 2010 at the expense of most of the other media.”

Russia and China are the fastest to grow in terms of internet revenues, and it is predicted Russia will move on the 6th place globally. It is not clear whether SEO is calculated in the reports or if it’s even considered a form of advertising model , my guess would be it is left out. Nevertheless, the more people shift to the internet, the higher will be the overall awareness of the SEM model, since the term “internet marketing” inevitably leads to SEO.

“Internet advertising already takes over 15 percent of adspend in four markets (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK). By 2010 we forecast the Internet to take more than 20 percent in the same four markets and more than 15 percent of adspend in 10,” the report said.

Writers Strike continues and is predicted to carry on into 2008 drawing more people online.

Currently the biggest in TV entertainment industry are starving for new jokes, plots and speeches as thousands of writers are striking corporate media to come with a fair internet revenue plan, demanding a good piece of the action in favor of writers. As a result, more and more people are headed to the net to feed entertainment addictions, and as WP put it:

“According to one theory, all those reruns and reality the networks plan to air might chase you onto the Web for your entertainment binges. Some of you (this theory predicts) will be so pleased with what you find online, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.”

All in all, internet will continue its steady climb to new heights, while SEO will stay an essential piece in the arsenal of internet marketers for as long as search engines exist, and search engines aren’t going anywhere.

P.S.
Watch a funny video made by one the writers =)