Web 2.0, Internet Marketing, from SEO to PPC

SEO 101 | Get to know your online visitors

2009-04-30T13:23:00.000-07:00

3. Get to know your online visitors.
How to do that? It's called analytics. Simple code pasted into the skeleton of your site and wham! instant information about your visitors. Done right, your marketing company/SEO should be able to share with you where your visitors are coming from, what they are doing and measure which paid online strategies are producing a return for your business. You can use this information to expand on your off-page optimization and promotion. Seth Godin calls it 'building Tribes'. It's understanding the fundamental behavior of consumers, and if you think about it, we are social creatures. Both offline and on. The task of good marketing is to understand consumer behavior and give you, business owner, the recommended strategy to attract your target consumers.

Now, armed with an understanding of your target market, seeing what your competition is doing and having a feel for the competitiveness of your market, setting some realistic goals of your online strategy, and implementing sound anaytic reporting, you are ready to jump into the elements of designing your site and the promotion strategy.

To get the most of your internet presence, visit Idaho SEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

Are you where your consumers can find you? Are your competitors? Bring a decade of internet marketing experience to your marketing department, email Idaho SEO for expert SEO consulting services to get your website and marketing strategy optimized.

SEO 101 | Idaho SEO | Market Research - Know your competition

2009-04-30T13:22:00.001-07:00

2. Understand your competitors.

The second step in creating an effective online strategy is doing your due diligence on your local market competitors (or if your target market is regional/national/worldwide - then your closest competitors) online or brick and mortar. One of the internet's most fabulous contributions IMO,is benchmark data and intelligence. Anything that happens online is trackable, and very well tracked, don't kid yourself.

Why take the shot in the dark or reinvent the wheel when you have competitive intelligence at your fingertips -- for free?? iMarketing wise, you will save yourself alot of effort and money (!) not taking on the big behemoths with deep, deep pockets to get that all encompassing, general keyword. If you are a small fish in a big pond, you will not be using your marketing dollars wisely. Could your website overtake the big guns who have achieved a PageRank of 5? Sure it can be done, but with a lot of time and a lot of work. And I still operate with my philosophy that you are in the business of running your business. Let us data geeks do the SEO sweat equity, I say.

A good SEO company is far more than managing PPC or getting inbound links, a full iMarketing strategy should include some insight consulting on your behalf to show you what your competitors are doing. You just might gain some insight to where your target market is as well.

Are you where your consumers can find you? Are your competitors? Bring a decade of internet marketing experience to your marketing department, email Idaho SEO for expert SEO consultingservices to get your website and marketing strategy optimized.

SEO 101 | May 2009

2009-01-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

I feel like sharing a bit of common information, but share it none-the-less, I will. The basics of SEO. Now there's so much going on past the sound SEO design of the website and chasing what's new and shiny in the online social mediasphere to be on. Sometimes marketers can suffer from a bit of ADHD - "Look Facebook! Ew that's cool. Forget Friendster!" (oh remember that one hit wonder? here and gone by the speed of the internet), and tromping off we go in a marketing guru stampede. So often I hear, "Are you on Twitter? FaceBook? (so old by today's terms), YouTube? Ning?" What's next? That's the big question that a good, quality SEO marketers is always working on.

But I find that so many business owners get lost in the sea of information that is search engine marketing and their SEOs forget to get back to the basics and take baby steps to teach their clients. So your thinking, "What is this SEO stuff, it changes so often how can I possibly understand it all, and most importantly, how can it make me more money?" SEO is not hard, I've said several times, it's not rocket science. It just takes time and a sound marketing strategy. It's about understanding your target audience, knowing what the competition is doing, and sound web design that appeals to your website visitors (that happens to include search engine robots as well as humans).

Since the robots don't buy your product, good SEO online marketing strategy starts with learning about your target market, how they use the internet in their personal consumption, then designing a strategy that fits your market segment, appeals to your online visitors, and ultimately brings revenue and success to your businesses.

Take a step back and let's look at marketing strategy from the 30k foot view. The true first steps of good search engine optimization start with these three things:

1. Know your consumer, target market.
Do you have a local market or service? National? International? What is the makeup and count of your target market? Do they use the internet and how do they use it? Not just in search, but socially. What does your marketing company/SEO know about your target market's online behavior?

Know which keywords are your most important, which ones are attainable organically as well as with ppc and affordable (especially if you are up-and-coming in a mature industry/mature web space), which ones your consumers are using, which ones your competitors are using.

How you build your site around your keywords, whether it's a fully hosted site, a word press or studio press, or even just a blogspot site, effective keyword use on and off site are more important that the host.

And you should also consider which search engine you want to focus on and then there are the vertical search sites such as Squidoo, Technorati or even FaceBook (whether or not your target market is there). Getting that strategy in place ahead of time can also have an effect on the methods you could employ for good online presence.

But instead of trying to tackle them all, learn more about your consumer and how they search for your type of product. Understanding your consumer and their online habits will do far more to enhance your business, gain more consumers and make more revenue for your endeavor.

In the next article, I'll cover the second point, Know Your Competition.

Are you where your consumers can find you? Are your competitors? Bring a decade of internet marketing experience to your marketing department, email Idaho SEO for expert SEO consultingservices to get your website and marketing strategy optimized.

I Am A Bad Search Engine Optimizer (SEO guru)

2009-01-29T06:59:00.001-08:00

That's it, I admit it. I am a bad SEO guru. I have a fundamental belief that this online marketing stuff is not rocket voodoo science, and therefore I don't approach it that way. I don't present it to my clients that way. I am flawed in that I, as Dave Ramsey refers to it, am a business person with the heart of a teacher. I operate with great transparency, wishing to show my clients how this online marketing stuff works and letting them know exactly what I'm going to be doing for them.

There's no "super secrets the SEO gurus don't want you to know". Well, maybe those that are taking exhorbitant fees each and every month and doing very little to enhance your website, they have a secret. And those that would use your monthly retainer to buy crap links in bulk (so 2003, and now a black hat tactic that is certain to earn penalty or blackball from the search engines) or engage in black hat seo design and practice.

And the hard sale. I simply cannot stand the hard sell. "Buy NOW! Super Secret SEO guaranteed to get you to the #1 position!"

I'm an internet consultant, not a used-car sales person. [And I've seen the ranking reports for that #1 position, it's usually on their own business name. Which for most businesses in local search - they should rank first if their consumer is searching for them with their business name. Even worse are rank reports generated to illustrate high search engine ranking on crap keywords with very little consumer interest.] Oh yeah, I can show you that too in search engine optimization reports. Actual benchmark data on consumer interest in the target keywords. It's just how I roll. Transparency and keeping the client's best interests at heart - not mine.

I want to teach my clients what is essential about how to manage their most valuable online asset - their website - or rather, their online market presence. Can you, the savvy business person, learn all about SEO for free? Yes! The information is out there in abudance, on the internet. However, the old information is out there too and wrong information and what used to be white-hat-but-is-now-black-hat is also out there. Well, it's just a full time job staying on top of the cutting edge social media and seo best practices. And that's what I'm here for.

I want to offer a service and my philosophy is that business owners are in the business of running their business. The reason they outsource their accounting, web design, marketing, or any other thing you can think that you have done for your business, is that they don't have the time, desire or talent strength in that area. They are willing to spend some of their hard earned money on a search marketing professional who is an expert in the area.

For example, I can design web sites, but I'm definitely not great at it. It's not my thing. I can write keyword-rich copy and know all the effective elements of building a strong search engine optimized website, but I'm far less talented than good copywriters. So, I'm going to hire one to do it for me. If you need an expert in online marketing and search engine optimization, take the time to hire an expert with years of experience and a large portfolio of satisfied clients.

I have a partner approach. I'm not going to hide my techniques from my client. I'm going to show them what I'm doing. I'm not going to hoard all the data and produce obscure hard-to-understand information to them. I'm want to teach them what it means and share my expertise in SEO.

And that is just terrible. The SEO industry is afraid of their clients questioning what it is they are paying for. They don't want the business owner to learn a little about how easy online marketing is and trying to steer their marketing strategy themselves. They do not like SEOs like me, who don't feel that they should gouge the small business owner for good SEO marketing. They don't like SEOs like me: Open, Transparent, Teachers. Sure, I won't make 6-7 figures doing it this way. But I'm okay with that. I'm here to serve and to teach good SEO and internet marketing to help businesses succeed.

What I love to do is teach. And I am here to share my decade of internet marketing experience, expertise and time spent becoming certified and credentialed. I love this iMarketing stuff. I live, eat and breath it. It takes a 'special' type of person to love reading anlaytical data like I do and searching out trends and chasing the consumer. I know my customers appreciate my passion and expertise in SEO.

So, I steer clear of advertised phrases like "Beat Google!", "Manipulate Google!", "Super Secret SEO Tactics Guaranteed to Obliterate the Search Engine as we all know it", blah blah blah. Yeah, give me that pill and I'll lose 42 lbs. and have rock hard gluts in 3.5 days too. You don't have to manipulate anything to have sound, quality search engine optimization on your site that will direct consumer traffic to you, so that your business can succeed.

Using the best possible, objective search engine optimization and online marketing strategy for your business is the only answer for good marketing. And that's what I'm here for.

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

The battle of IE and Firefox. IE wins.

2009-01-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

I am certainly no fan of IE. I've even gone so far as to uninstall it from my home machine. I can't stand the old clunker. However! Statistics clearly show that IE commands the market share of browser use with over 75% of consumers still using IE to do their internet surfing.

So it just confounds me to see websites, time and time again, that don't render well in IE. Web designers are so into Firefox, and yes, it's a much better browswer than IE. I'm partial to Google's Chrome myself and have been using it since Beta (a big deal for me; I'll admit it I'm not an early adopter). But, you are doing yourself a disservice by not having a site that performs in all the browsers.

This is kind of a reverse example, but it goes to show that even the most sophisticated of businesses with deep, deep pockets and top designing webmasters, can still fumble the browser test. I was just on a world-class ski resort's website this past week, that will remain unnamed, (not far from Idaho Falls over the Tetons - ahem), and oh! how badly that site rendered in Chrome. Again, I uninstalled IE from my home machine, so if they had only designed for one browswer, there would be trouble for this multi-million dollar business to be representing itself so poorly online.

So, business owner, make sure your web designer has couched their browser ego, and always remember to design for IE and especially, don't forget to test in it. And business owners, unless your target market is tech-savvy people, make sure to ask your webmaster if they have designed for IE and tested that shiny, new, expensive investment (a.k.a. your website) in ALL the browsers.

Better yet, why not take the time to join the tech-savvy group? Go ahead download IE and Chrome, they're all free, and be sure to test your site yourself. After all, you likely take care of your store front, keep your company cars clean, etc.,. without hesitation, yes? If your store front, company cars or other consumer-facing media were defaced, dirty or not representing your business professionally, you would be taking the steps to clean it up.

Think about your browser like you would your target market. If you were international and your target market spoke Spanish, French, German, you would likely have website pages in those languages or a clear translator link on your site so that you could clearly speak to your target audience. Browser design is the same. Make sure your website design is for your consumers' preference, not just your web designer's. Make sure your website is friendly for IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and to all the other up-and-coming-browsers.

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

Are you where your consumers can find you? Are your competitors? Bring a decade of internet marketing experience to your marketing department, emailIdaho SEO for expert SEO consulting services to get your website and marketing strategy optimized.

Why Search Marketing Will Hold Its Own in a Recession

2008-12-03T12:55:00.000-08:00

In an article by Rob Garner in Search Insider, it is cited that despite the fact that we are in a recession and now have been all year, the search channel has performed well and continues to perform well. The ROI has been much higher than all marketing channels. Our clients continue to see positive growth in online purchases and revenue.

The main reasons search works well in good and recessionary markets is highligted:

Measureability
Prequalified visitors
Sponsored search traffic becomes natural search traffic
Search reaches 90% of people online
Search marketing is accessible to all sized businesses.
Targeted relevance

Read the full story at Search Insider

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

Why Online Advertising Works

2008-11-20T12:26:00.000-08:00

Recent results compiled by comScore and reported by Direct illustrate the impact that online advertising has on consumer behavior and online advertising ROI.

Online sales were found to be lifted 27% for up to 3 months after exposure to the advertising
Offline sales reaped a 17% lift following exposure to advertising

That's it. Online advertising works. Not only are you reaching your target consumers at the very time in which they are shopping for your product (consumers searching keywords associated with lodging in your area), but results show that overall, sales are increased by 44%! Click to read the full article.

Don't let fears about a down economy stint your business strategy. Now is the time to be marketing! Yes, business will see some slide in a battered economy, but it's the most opportune time to be focusing your efforts to get those consumers who will be purchasing. Idaho SEO marketing can take your business to the internet using the very latest optimization and sponsored advertising strategies aimed at getting you in front of your consumers.

There's two strategies to engage in presently:

Pushing your message out on the world wide web to capture the attention of consumers.

Capitalizing on the consumer trend of budget-conscious purchasing by offering packages and promotions to capture those shopping online for the very best deals.

What does that mean? Well, to use the examples of Wal-Mart and McDonalds. This past summer when gas prices were peaking, retailers were reporting signicant drops in their business - yet Wal-Mart posted one of it's best months of the year. As consumers are tightening their belts and seeing their discretionary income get slimmer, they are becoming more budget conscious. The white table cloth dining industry is taking a beating, yet McDonalds just reported that sales are still strong.

Targeting the right segment of your universe with the right offering and right product is the healthy way to grow your business in a down economy. Let IdahoSEO marketing provide you with the insight and tools to effectively market your business online.

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

The importance of the Google mindset

2008-11-17T13:02:00.000-08:00

At the recent SAS Premiere Business Leadership Series event, it was noted that when it comes to shopping for hotel rooms on hotels.com, there can be such as thing as too much choice. The internet-savvy consumer has become a search drone, relying on little more than placement and ranking as a prequalifier of hotel quality.

Given a choice between slicing and dicing search results to find the perfect hotel room, most consumers were found to pick a hotel from the first five results. That means all the capability of incorporating prices, star ratings, distance and other factors to influence consumer decision, it comes down to rank.

I'm astounded. The first five positions. No matter what the search vehicle, an Online Travel Agency, a search engines results page, listing by quality or simply alphabetically, consumers view listings in the top 5 results as an endorsement from that source.

Rank is an endorsement. No matter what you offer, no matter where you advertise. Your position, or rank in those results, is the measure by which consumers judge you. So the important question to ask is, has your marketing been paying off for you? Are you purchasing your position in some search vehicle or OTA? Engaging in search engine optimization to capture the all important organic visitor? Are you even in the right search engine or source?

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

The Answer Is All of the Above

2008-11-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

Since internet search is becoming the primary channel by which consumers are shopping everything from products to travel, having a web presence is paramount to any business. Even if it's as simple as making sure you have a business listing in the search engines.

But more importantly, the savvy businessperson is using optimization to place their website - their online store front, if you will - in the best possible endorsed space there is - the first page of Google SERPs. That's search engine results page for the lay-citizen. Getting within that prized web space is like getting an endorsement from the search engine of your choice, be it Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Legacy concepts about sales, marketing and distribution channels are falling to the wayside and should be kicked to the curb. The question to ask is your website an ad? a shopping cart? a customer service vehicle? a property tour? a trusted source of information? a direct mail piece? a loyalty club or a sales person?

And the answer is All of the Above.

Your website is your brand. It generates both sales and customers. Do more than sell products, support your clients, engage them in a relationship with you through your online presence.

When prospects are on your site, they are on your site. Consumers lump the perception of your business office with that of your website. Physical or digital, your website is the first experience people will have with your business. Is it as good as you want it to be?

Competitive space. Consumers can open up your site and your nearest competitors and compare all three. Do you stand out over the others??

Don't let acronyms like PPC, SEO, CRM, CMS scare you into inaction. Get affordable expertise for your online web presence today. To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

Consumer Trends

2008-11-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

I worked in the hotel industry, so I'm always interested in the latest consumer trends with regards to searching and spending money.

With the old model of Online Travel Agents (OTAs) such as Hotels.com or Travelocity, the consumer visited the site, did a hotel search, selected a room, paid with credit card, and booking was complete.

But with consumer's increasing use of search engines to shop for rooms online, the traditional funnel has begun to significantly change. Not only is Google showing it's dominance in referral traffic (I'm assuming organic referrals, but won't rule out PPC referrals) but it's quickly approaching the majority of all unique (first time visitors) referral traffic as seen in the below line graph, but the bar chart at the bottom highlights the steady growth in direct consumer traffic from the search engines.

What does this mean for you? That both search engine optimization and online paid marketing are the dominate channels in which to acquire new customers.

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors.

Are you where your consumers can find you? What about your competitors? Bring a decade of internet marketing experience to your marketing department, email Idaho SEO for expert SEO consulting services to get your website and marketing strategy optimized. Visit www.idaho-seo.com for more information on how you can leverage the power of a decade of internet marketing and expertise to your business.

Common Mistakes that even SEO Gurus make

2008-08-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

SEO is just not an exact science. With the ever constant changes in the rules of search marketing, online indexing, what may have been standard practice, is not outdated. So, while we webmasters and search engine optimizers attempt to stay on the cutting edge of changes, there's always the lag in information relay, getting too busy with business to stay up on research or falling back on "old" techniques out of habit or carelessness. Make sure your website stays on top organically by avoiding these mistakes:

1. Using the same Title and Meta description for all pages. Every page has its unique content and it should go the same for the Title and Meta tags. Each page should be optimized according to a particular set of keywords that are the most relevant to the content of that page. If you place the same title and meta description for all pages, your keywords will not match the content and thus making it harder to optimize.

2. Stop optimizing once results are shown. Many optimizers stop doing the necessary optimization such as off-page optimization when they see that their keywords have obtained high rankings. SEO is an ongoing process. Every day, there are competitors competing top ranking positions with you. With complacency, sooner or later your website will be knocked off from the top positions by them.

3. Placing a splash page as the home page. The home page is one of the most important pages of a website, whether be it for SEO purpose or visitors experience. By placing a splash page as the home page, it will result in a SEO disaster. So try to avoid having a splash page for your website. Instead, use a flash banner to make your site more interactive.

4. Forgetting that content is the king. In SEO, one of the most important aspects is the content. Search engines love fresh and unique content. Sometimes, optimizers are too focused on tagging and forget that content is very important. When you write your content, do not just write for the search engine sake. You need to consider your visitors' experience too. Content stuffed with keywords but without real meaning and value will not result in any conversion. This will defeat the purpose of SEO for your site.

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO Get online, get found, get sales. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing effortsput you ahead of your competitors. Our trained marketing specialists and skilled web design consultants will optimize your website so you get found.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cheow_Yu_Yuan

Internet Marketing is not rocket science

2008-07-07T22:41:00.000-07:00

I've been in the 'biz' for a decade now. I've experienced the internet revolution, from the text based usenets and 'fetch' program to being one of the first users of Mozilla at the Univeristy of Colorado at Boulder. (wow! windows-based surfing the internet)

Working for DoubleClick, who served up the first banner ad on dilbert.com back in 1996, I experienced the world of online marketing, rode the wave of the e-commerce revolution as businesses flocked to "retail-ize" the world wide web much to the chagrin of the intellectuals, took the punches and the shock wave of the McCarthy-istic lawsuits which blamed cookies for invading consumer's homes and privacy, reached out to consumers with the advent of email marketing, poked, prodded, probed and taught online retailers how to understand the new creature - the multi-channel consumer - using analytics and metrics.

Oh how I love the internet and especially, marketing on the internet. I love how it's connected users around the world, empowered individuals to become authors, publishers and entrepreneurs. Ecommerce, online marketing, search engine optimization, web 2.0 has leveled the playing field for every individual to publish, sell and network, regardless of age, ability, talent or resources.

The next frontier of video, podcasting, social networking and consumer generated media has created an internet by the people and for the people.

To get the most of your internet presence, visit IdahoSEO , optimize your website, optimize your business, maximize your revenue. 71% of all consumers begin their search online - do they end with you? Let our professional marketing efforts put you ahead of your competitors. Our trained marketing specialists and skilled web design consultants will optimize your website so you get found.