Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category

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

   Not many people are aware of this but these days PPC and SEO go hand in hand. Ever since Google introduced the concept of quality score and landing page quality scores, search engine ranking of your site and landing pages will affect the amount of money you pay for each click. Google puts it this way:

“Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic will decrease and their minimum cost per click will increase.”

   How can you ensure that your website doesn’t have a low quality score? Here are some tips:

• Work on SEO for your site, if your site ranks well you will have a higher quality score
• Provide relevant, unique and substantial content on the product or service.
• Add an ‘about us’ page
• Add a short privacy policy
• Add details on returns / refunds if you’re selling something on your website
• Add a contacts page
• If your site displays advertising, distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content or think about removing completely.
• Don’t link to shady sites.

Here’s what Google has to say about this https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=9356.

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

   Local search can be a very valuable tool. A lot of people use Internet for product and service research purposes and then go transact locally. It is important to keep in mind that as with any direct marketing tool the focus should be on the return on investment (ROI). Track results you get from customers that contact you through the site to calculate your ROI. Many internet marketers say this is not possible for regular brick and mortar stores and local businesses. This is not true. The problem is they forgot the old school tactics  of using coupons for tracking. Display discount coupons for people that come to your website from local search in cases like these and you’ll be able to track your ROI by tracking sales you get from each specific coupon code.

Technorati Tags: brick and mortar business, double my sales, leads generation, promoting your business