In these tough economic times you might be tempted to do some things yourself. If you were thinking about doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization), here are a few fundamental things about doing SEO:

• Add your site to legitimate website directories (e.g. dir.yahoo.com, dmoz.org) on the Internet. There are lots of spam directories which will not provide you with any value. Search engines love links to your site and there are a lot of legitimate directories that will allow you to add your site to them. The rule of thumb to determine if a directory is legitimate or not is to check if there’s a rigorous editorial process involved. If there is then that directory is legitimate, otherwise if almost anyone can get in will be useless to you.
• Provide unique content on your site that people will find valuable (advice, tips related to your business, products or services).
• Do not use “tricks” you don’t understand. Lots of links from reputable sites (avoid shady sites) and great content will help you considerably.
• Give it time. After you added great content and lots of links from legitimate sites, it may take a few months for you to see results.
• The truth is adding all those links (especially if you have to follow editorial guidelines), making changes to the website, keeping up with proper techniques that change almost every several months takes a lot of time. If you’re not getting results you want after a few months or if you don’t have the time or knowhow to do it all, it may be time to hire a professional.

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), seo, site promotion, website promotion, website traffic

It’s the New Year and a lot of people make New Year’s resolutions. Some time ago Google released a very valuable market research tool that allows you to see the search trends that show what people are searching for, when and where. The graph at the top shows the search trend for one of the common New Year’s resolutions (weight loss). The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from some time in 2004), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches. It’s funny how it spikes as every New Year shown comes around and then slowly dies off until next year.

So how can this be valuable to you? Here are a few examples:

1. You can see when your customers are more interested in your products/services and plan to market yourself more aggressively during that time. A lot of them are obvious. In the example I showed it is evident that a lot of people want to lose weight around the New Year’s. A lot of people search for “summer camps” before the end of the school year. Others are not so obvious and it may be very valuable for you to check out when your customers are interested in your products and services.
2. If you’re starting a new business you can check if demand for your product or service is going up or down. For example interest in software development has been on a steady decline since 2004.
3. You can check which geographical market is most interested in your product or service.
4. You can compare different markets. For example did you know that dogs are more popular than cats or any other house pets?
5. If you’re in retail you can check when holiday shopping really starts.

These are just some of the uses, but the possibilities are mind blowing.

Technorati Tags: double my sales, E-Commerce, Internet Marketing, ppc, promoting your business, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search engines, selling products online, seo, site promotion, website promotion, website traffic

One of the most popular questions that I get from people that are interested in doing SEO or PPC today is: “Which search engine is the most popular one?” This is a very logical question.  Ten years ago, most business owners knew that if they wanted more customers all they had to do was call the local Yellow Pages representative or a newspaper, choose which ad size they wanted and that was it!

Now that people have dumped their newspapers and phone books in the garbage and simply go to search engines to find what they are looking for, business owners definitely need to know which search engines are the most popular ones so that they can ensure that their business is front and center when their potential customer does the search.  Of course, internet marketing companies are always willing to help as well!

So what kind of changes happened in 2008? Here is the information you have been waiting for. Well, we can definitely call it the year of Google, again. Although it wasn’t news to anyone that Google was the most popular search engine, by the end of 2008 Google broken through the 80% market share ceiling! In fact it is estimated that close to 82% of searches worldwide are now done through Google.

While market share of most other search engines remained mostly unchanged the recent gains of Google seem to have come at the cost of Yahoo!, which has been in a steep decline of late and now stands at around 10% in second place after Google.

Now what does this mean to your business? Well it’s certainly good news and bad news. We’re again in the market were you can only deal with one or two organizations like it used to be before with yellow pages and one or two newspapers. Because Google and Yahoo have close to 92% of the market why bother with the other 8%? The problem of course is that Google has a monopoly on the search market and it’s only increasing. This means that if you were thinking of starting a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or PPC campaign it is better to start it sooner rather than later as more and more of your competitors are focusing their sights on Google and SEO and PPC will only get more expensive. In fact PPC costs have been steadily rising at a pace of close to 30% each year over the past 10 years due to consolidation of search engines market and shift of advertising spending to online channels.

Technorati Tags: Internet Marketing, ppc, promoting your business, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search engines, seo, site promotion, website promotion, website traffic

One of the easiest ways for businesses to save money is automating some of their existing business processes. It allows to free up existing staff to do other work or eliminate the need for additional staff. A lot of businesses do the same work multiple times like:

• Entering information in one form and then doing the same thing in 3 other forms
• Spending time on creating reports and looking up information.
• Organizing and sorting documents or files

All this work can be automated and save many businesses the need to keep staff that does this kind of repetitive work or allow you to direct them do more valuable work. It usually saves hundreds of thousands per year for a company of small size. It really is a no brainer if you have at least one person doing this repetitive work. Usually for the cost of a year’s salary you can create a system that will do most of the work for you.

Technorati Tags: custom software development, Software and Web Development

   As long as there was web design there were clients asking for a fancy intro page (sometimes called a splash page). An intro page is a specially designed welcome page, meant to be the first page a person sees before entering a website. They often have fancy graphics, sound or flash animation that welcomes the visitor. They usually include a link that say “Skip Intro” or “Click here to enter site.” Although most people agree they are beautiful to look at, professional web designers and search engine optimization specialists universally agree that splash / intro pages are a BAD IDEA. Here’s why:

1. They Annoy Visitors. Visitors to your website want to get to the information on your website as quickly as possible. Intro pages waste your visitor’s time by forcing the visitor to take unnecessary steps to get to the content of your website. The main goal of a website is to provide easily accessible information to visitors and splash pages stand in their way.
2. Lower Search Engine Ranking. Two of the most important things Search Engines look for are text-based content and text-based hyperlinks, neither of which is available on a splash intro page usually. The other goal of a website is to be found by Search Engines, and intro pages make this difficult.
3. 80% of Consumers Hate Intros! Here’s a market research report done by Marketing Sherpa https://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.html?ident=23442
4. Newfangled did some digging into their access logs and had this to say about their findings: “The number one reason for getting rid of our splash page was that it turned away at least 25% of our site visitors, sometimes more. This percentage has actually been researched and it turns out that at least 25% of site visitors will immediately leave a site as soon as they see a  message for a Flash splash screen (even if there’s a ’skip intro’ link). Our access logs confirmed this for us and this over all the other reasons caused us to get rid of it. The opportunity to improve our creativity was not worth the loss of such a high percentage of visitors. “
5. “Click to Enter” is redundant. By visiting your site your visitor already agreed to enter it, why do they have to do it again?  It’d be like opening the door to a store only to find another door that says, “Ha-ha, just kidding.  Open this door to enter for real this time.”
6. Minimizing steps. You want to minimize the number of steps involved in reaching your offerings. Having an extra click from an intro page does not align with this idea.
7. You need to have uniform navigation. Most splash pages don’t have the same primary navigation as the rest of the site. Some even drastically change the design when you go from the intro page to the real site. This is confusing to users who respond best to navigation that is persistent. Splash pages also enforce the idea that they are visiting two separate sites.

Technorati Tags: brick and mortar business, usability, Website Design