photo credit: Henriksent

Online marketing is a constantly developing field of expertise, with innovations emerging weekly – but no development has been quite significant over the past year than the rise of mobile devices. With more people than ever before owning smartphones and tablets, mobile devices are fast becoming the most important factor among internet marketing experts, who all advise that optimising a website for mobile traffic is the priority for 2012.

Because smartphones and tablets such as the iPhone and iPad have a full browsing ability, unlike the previous generation of mobile phones, they can still navigate a “normal” webpage without too much difficulty. Nevertheless, they still benefit from a more mobile-friendly site – and this is especially true for commercial sites. From an online marketing perspective, increased mobile traffic leads to more sales and conversions, as nowadays an ever-increasing amount of online transactions are being conducted via mobile devices.

Search engine giant Google has confirmed once again that mobile queries reached a peak the week before Christmas last year – the same as in 2010 – which indicates that mobile users are making the most of their devices for the busiest shopping period of the year. With this in mind, retailers need to be offering internet marketing campaigns that target mobile devices and use adverts specially enhanced for these devices. They could even consider separate campaigns for mobile consumption with tweaked messages and offers – such as discounts for customers that place orders or make purchaes via their smartphones or tablets.

A report published last year by tech research company Gartner estimated that mobile traffic will overtake traffic from desktop and laptop computers by 2013 across the globe. With this “deadline” looming, any company or organisation that relies on its online presence should be optimising their sites for mobile traffic, if they have not already done so. The research also showed an underlying trend that is more worrying: many online marketing professionals had not woken up to this sea change in internet behaviour and did not trust users of mobile devices to register with their sites or make online purchases – although all the evidence points the opposite way.

Fortunately, good online marketing companies are perfectly placed to assist clients with the process of mobile traffic optimisation, and can offer both advice and technical expertise.

Make sure that your website is not left behind in the mobile revolution!

Dan Coysh

Daniel has been a freelance journalist and providing SEO Copywriting services for over three years now at Online Media Direct, after eight years as reporter and news editor for a national newspaper. He has provided SEO news content for a number of sites and on several occasions has completely rewritten a website’s text – both in the public and private sectors.

One of the biggest keys in writing and submitting SEO-rich articles and content is having the perfect balance of quality and keywords present at all times. You need to provide web publishers and readers with well-written, entertaining and informative content. You also need to be keyword smart so that your articles will do well in searches in both the article directories and on the major search engines. In doing this, SEO-savvy webmasters often try to balance both, albeit for naught or success.

There are no guarantees that your article will be appearing on the first pages of the search engines within days, or perhaps ever. However, if you maintain these methods over a period of time you will find that your articles will begin to bring the traffic you desire to your website. Without a doubt, good content should always take precedent and the major search engines are finding more and more ways to reward good content on the web, while penalizing keyword heavy content that holds little value for readers.

Many of us have run searches and clicked on one of the results only to be presented with a pointless, barely readable article that is stuffed with keywords. In 88% of cases, the immediate reaction is to click away from such a page as quickly as possible. The point here is that whoever published this page effectively used keywords to get a high search engine page ranking and get visitors to the page. However, the poor quality of the page’s content means that the visitors are lost immediately.

Therefore, the secret is to find a good balance. With a little work you can produce an article that reads well and has enough targeted keywords to help with SEO. In general, keywords should never go above the 3 percent mark on your density. So, if your article reaches 600 words, you shouldn’t have more than 18 keywords to avoid looking spammy.

When you are writing article marketing content, you will first need to decide on a subject you wish to write about and the keywords and keyphrases you want to use. Researching these keywords well is vital and there are many tools available online to help you with this. In general, your keywords should match the words a potential reader who is interested in the subject of your article might type into a search engine.

Also, it is not about how many keywords you have, but where you place them. Above all, the keyword should appear in the headline, the description, the opening paragraph and the last paragraph. These are by far the most important. The remaining keywords can be interspersed with the main content at any points you choose and where it reads well. If this is done well, the reader won’t even realize that there are keywords in the article.

Once the article is written you should edit it to make sure it reads well and achieves the purpose you intended. In general, an article should be informative or entertaining. When you are happy with the article you can then worry about inserting the keywords. Sometimes you will find places where they will slot in naturally with the flow of the articles, while in the other cases you may have to change the wording a little. However, do not leave keywords interfere with the structure, meaning or readability of the content.

It’s always suggested that you give your work a glance-over to assure that there are no grammatical or spelling errors. Sometimes, as you reread your article you will often see more opportunities to subtly work in a few more keywords without disrupting the article. Now, you have an article that will serve you on two fronts. It has the good content to get it noticed and published by web publishers and it has the keywords needed to draw the attention you need to both the article itself and your website, which tends to create the perfect balance of quality and keywords you were seeking.

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a background checks website Easy Background Checks as well as a marriage records website Genealinks.

greg henderson

California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. Knowledge is power, and through my public records projects, I hope to give power of knowledge to you.

If you were born in the early 60′s or 70′s, you would hardly think socializing through online media would ever be a possibility; in fact, I distinctly remember sitting at my old Commodore 64 learning how to program nifty graphical syntaxes while chatting with my friend next to me; time has evolved to the point where we can chat with people in Iceland as if we were right in their living rooms. Whereas many people see this as an opportunity for global connection, businesses find this as a way to harvest potential worldwide traffic and potential customers. In this passage, we look at the need to direct your online media traffic wisely to not only cultivate targeted customers, but to cultivate life-long business and interpersonal relationships built on trust.

Seeking social media traffic is more than simply busting out Tweets and updating Facebook profiles; in essence, humility is necessary on both the business and personal levels in order to truly understand the people you wish to attract. You have to treat each person as number one, listening to the needs, trends and wants of each individual person before you even attempt to show them anything you are promoting. Sure, you’ll want to definitely geotarget traffic that will have a specific interest in what you’re selling; if you treat each person as a ‘sales push’, however, expect to get nowhere. Finding a comfort zone that both your potential customers and your business can exist on is the imminent key when cultivating online media contacts, always addressing each friend or colleagues concerns as an individual instead of categorizing them as a whole is also necessary, too.

Directing your online media traffic wisely also entails finding the best resource available for your niche. This would entail understanding what business-minded people or groups exist that closely resemble your niche and making sure to join those specific circles; simply going out and making friends just ‘because’ will often times land you disinterested people who simply wish to talk about life’s general happenings. Find organizations – Linked In being a great starting point – and find groups that closely resemble your primary directives, joining conversations that can cultivate new angles and eventually new friends. If you choose to use Facebook, it would be best to begin your efforts on a local level and slowly expand outward instead of joining global groups that may not be suited towards your niche.

It’s no secret your goals are to promote a business or product and expand operations; everyone wants to be considered prosperous. Having a tactical yet conservative approach to directing online media traffic wisely can surely be a huge catalyst in sustaining your efforts while building friendships that will last a lifetime and help to push your efforts across the board. Emailing the world with your offers and pushing affiliate links through Tweets is not what people want to see – it is the person that takes the time to outreach that will end up reaping the benefits of well-planted friendship seeds.

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a background checks website Easy Background Checks as well as a marriage records website Genealinks.

greg henderson

California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. Knowledge is power, and through my public records projects, I hope to give power of knowledge to you.

No one will ever dispute the fact that search engine optimization is paramount in obtaining excellent traffic numbers, especially organically.  Once the potential customer arrives at your site, however, you have to be prepared to win them over with well-written content, offers that don’t seem pushy and a smooth navigation around your website.  Having said this, we’ll concentrate on keeping content current and fresh today, a facet that is perhaps more important that what you are selling as if your writings are of little interest, chances are your products will not get many looks either.  Concentration on solid website content is an absolute must if you wish to convert your readers into subscribers or product purchasers.

Keeping your website current with trends that are happening in your niche is perhaps the first key that needs to be addressed in your content.  Are you writing for today and tomorrow, or are you rehashing things already covered yesterday? People get tired of whimsically racing around websites attempting to stay in-step with current news; providing well-researched content is important for your organic search rankings and in doing so, you’ll draw a larger interest from a wider spectrum of readers as you’ll be well ahead of the written curve in your niche, and customers bank on this to make informed decisions such as purchases.  Watch local news, read authoritative newspapers or even browse through magazines to generate your content in your own personal, professional opinion based on how your niche is trending at the moment.

Grammatically correct content is also a huge key to having a successful readership; people want to read articles that are of sound native tongue and flow naturally when reading.  Using difficult jargon to express an opinion or feeling is not going to help your viewing audience; you should always write at the internationally accepted reading level of 8-9 grade, making it easy to understand across the board.  Your content should insult a college professor or make the uneducated feel uncomfortable; therefore, write at a grade level appeasing to the masses and understood by the same.

Finally, avoid writing 1000 word posts as often as you can; should you wish to captivate an audience with any points and close the article out with a call to action, it is important to be as thorough as possible within 600 words.  You can make opening arguments, explain your position, and any final thoughts well within that word count while entertaining your audience enough to take an action of purchasing or contacting you.  The goal is to keep your visitors on as many pages as possible for hours, if possible.  You’ll lose interest fast if there is 10 useless paragraphs sandwiched in between three great ones; condense your content to open strong and finish stronger, assuring the reader you have the answers to any open questions or can leave their commentary on your content.  Allowing this open dialogue can add to your content, which is all the better reason to make your opinion count in as short of space as possible, considering dialogue will grow if the subject is interesting enough to sound off on.

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a background checks website Easy Background Checks as well as a marriage records website Genealinks.

greg henderson

California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. Knowledge is power, and through my public records projects, I hope to give power of knowledge to you.

The newcomer and your expert internet marketers all share one common interest: Trying to get their websites indexed through the top three major search engines quickly. For larger websites the task is even more daunting, and there are a few small but effective techniques that can assist in the indexing process. Patience is a virtue and in today’s internet marketing world patience and planning is a key element of success in getting your content and websites correctly indexed into the search giants.

Smaller one or two page websites, also known as sales pages, are the easiest and quickest to get indexed in the three major search engines almost anyone can generally succeed by just manually submitting through each search engines submission process. Websites with a considerable number of pages will often only immediately get their first page indexed which therefore requires small effective planning strategies and a little bit of patience to become completely indexed and incrementally found in organic search results.

Key Strategies Necessary:

- Prior to submitting your websites to the search engines or establishing link partners which will cause the search engines to start indexing in your website. Start planning out the basic website structure so that search engines robots can easily flow through your website and index each page.

(a) Have an sitemap linked from you main index page that thinks through out your website.

(b) If possible, ensure that each page is linked together, not just back to the main index page. This is not possible depending on what type of website you have, the number of pages, or your website design and structure. But this has been a successful technique in the past.

(c) Build and submit a Google Sitemap.

- Test your websites design and structure using Google Sitemap Software such as SOFTplus GSiteCrawler (Freeware) that will try and index your entire website. If your unsuccessful building a index of your entire website, then further planning and design changes maybe in order to index your entire website. If the software can not index your entire website, how will the search engine robots index your entire website?

- Instead of manually submitting your websites, submit your website through directories and establish link partnerships. This will improve how often your website is crawled by the search engines and how fast your website is indexed. Also, when establishing link partnership and directories higher the Google Page Rank, the quicker your website will be indexed and how often your website is crawled.

- Patience. The process the search engine will go through while indexing your website is: First, the search engine will have to find your website (Hence, establishing partnerships with high Google Page Rank), then crawling through your website and absorbing all the information contained, then ranking each individual page and finally your website will appear in the search engine result pages.

This type of patience and dedication in getting the website prepared and eventually indexed can be perplexing yet exciting at the same time.  Keep all of the steps you took to get indexed written down for the next time you need a quick reference in indexing your site or the sites of others. Always raise your patience high and keep your goals reachable in any search engine endeavor; keep current with trends and proper principles by reading other good articles such as those found on this site written by professionals in the industry.

About The Guest Author

Greg Henderson, a California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. His current projects include a criminal records site PeopleSearchPro.com, and a marriage records site Genealinks.com.

greg henderson

California-based businessman with over 11 years in SEO/SEM, provided this piece based on personal endeavors and education in search engine optimization with a concentration on content optimization for the social media future. Knowledge is power, and through my public records projects, I hope to give power of knowledge to you.

photo credit: stoneysteiner

Online marketing professionals should take note of recent guidance on how to optimise a business’s on-site search and navigation to drive up sales and increase customer satisfaction – pointing out that there are various ways that retailers can improve this.

Fact-Finder head of UK operations Mathias Duda said that improved search and navigation on websites “can drive sales through personalised merchandising, increase a user’s experience of a brand and help retailers get a better understanding of their customers and how they behave on their website” – adding that too many retailers neglect site optimisation as part of their online marketing strategy.

One major improvement that can be made is changing the search function so that it understands misspellings and synonyms – up to 40 per cent of queries are spelt differently to actual product names, so this would clearly increase sales.

A general point also worth considering is that improved knowledge of what customers are seeking on a site will in turn improve online marketing by improving the efficiency of AdWords and SEO choices.

Dan Coysh

Daniel has been a freelance journalist and providing SEO Copywriting services for over three years now at Online Media Direct, after eight years as reporter and news editor for a national newspaper. He has provided SEO news content for a number of sites and on several occasions has completely rewritten a website’s text – both in the public and private sectors.

The computer giant Microsoft urged companies this week to make search engine optimisation (SEO) just one aspect of an integrated and varied online marketing campaign.

Microsoft group search manager Colm Bracken said that a good SEO element can extend all other internet marketing campaigns and other forms of online marketing – for instance, consumers may well see a product or service advertised on television and then look for it online to discover more details before going to a shop to buy it. This is even more likely if they first saw the product advertised online using a mobile device.

Mr Bracken noted that a recent Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) survey found that 40 per cent of consumers made internet searches after watching TV adverts, adding: “So search amplifies the overall marketing strategy and curiously, in terms of complementing other media too, we know that search drives offline sales.”

Another part of last year’s IAB Search Barometer was the revelation that 99 per cent of brands believe that there is room for more SEO integration with their online marketing campaigns.

Dan Coysh

Daniel has been a freelance journalist and providing SEO Copywriting services for over three years now at Online Media Direct, after eight years as reporter and news editor for a national newspaper. He has provided SEO news content for a number of sites and on several occasions has completely rewritten a website’s text – both in the public and private sectors.

photo credit: Chris Doelle

In particular industries the views and mind sets of the individuals within those industries can be set completely on the way a website looks and obsession with how aesthetically pleasing a website looks. Graphic designers and Video production industries are examples where the ultimate aim of the individuals is to create a site that looks amazing. An amazing logo and classy, modern look are what people within these creative industries salivate over.

The integration of a flashy selection of images followed by an embedded video quite Franky turns these people on. At times when consulting with a traditional web design company the combination of a creative industry mind and web designer without the backup of internet marketing really can be like the blind being lead by the blind.

You can explain the fact that “you do realize sir that without any form of either search engine optimisation or pay per click advertising no one will visit your site”.

Right away the creative mind still obsessed by there flashy graphic in amazement returns with a statement along the lines . “People visit our website following meetings we don’t need to promote for keywords our business doesn’t work like that” is a standard reply.

When you view the sites google analytics to discover the site has generated 5 visits over the past 6 months but they continue to dish out thousands of pounds on a video production that will be lucky if it generates a handful of views an Internet Marketing savy individual looks on in amazement.

It is the equivalent of opening a Mcdonalds Restaurant on a oil rig in the North Sea. It will look great but only a hand full of people will ever see it. But you try telling the video production man that the video he brags about to all and sundry is as much use as a chocolate fireguard embedded in his new flashy site as no one will see it and you will get a blank expression.

A lack of understanding is obvious but a lack of willing to understand is also a problem. Lets not paint all the creative minds with the same brush as there are examples of company’s out there with a broad enough mind who understand the potential of this area. It is these companies that a flourishing online and generating natural leads and traffic and are not stuck in the dark ages still reliant on a few contacts for the next job.

One contact V’s hundreds of thousands of new ones via Internet Marketing really is a no brainer.

Garry Pickles

As the Managing Director of Online Media Direct Garry takes care of the day to day management of the company. Garry has been working within the Internet Marketing Industry for the previous 10 years and has a wide range of experiences in SEO, CPC and Social Media. | Follow me on Google Plus

photo credit: David Boyle

One online marketing expert has made his predictions for the major areas of interest in the sector set to dominate the New Year.

Hit Search founder Andrew Redfern said that copywriting skills will become “more important than ever” in 2011 as quality of content starts to be the decider in many online advertising campaigns.

He said that marketing teams will have to raise the bar when it comes to their knowledge skills, as they respond to the increasingly fragmented nature of the online marketing arena.

A third area in which online marketing is due to develop is in terms of planning, he went on. The new ability on search engines such as Google to carry out localised searches and focus on cross-platform resources, ­­­means that online advertising campaigns will need to be better integrated over the next 12 months if they are to be successful.

The final major area of development in the world of online marketing in 2011 will be cross-platform marketing, as previously alluded to. Mr Redfern stressed that “HTML5 will allow for a more strategic view to function over multiple platforms.”

When it comes to SEO marketing, he said that the localisation of Google would have a significant effect over the next 12 months, with more complex systems of management and delivery required. The year will see the “blurred lines” between SEO and social media such as Facebook and Twitter becoming even more so, especially as local additions are placed on Google and other search engines.

Google itself is likely to remain the number one search engine, although as the year progresses the likes of Bing and Yahoo will be clawing back a small amount of the market, Mr Redfern predicted.

However, Facebook is also set to launch its own search listings in 2011, again with the focus on localisation.

Dan Coysh

Daniel has been a freelance journalist and providing SEO Copywriting services for over three years now at Online Media Direct, after eight years as reporter and news editor for a national newspaper. He has provided SEO news content for a number of sites and on several occasions has completely rewritten a website’s text – both in the public and private sectors.