Archive for March, 2012

Webinar to Explore SEO Marketing Potential of Google+

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Online marketing professionals from the UK may wish to take a note of the date and put their names down for a special webinar on the combined potential of Google+ and SEO next month.

The event has been organised by US company Search Mojo, and is being hosted by its CEO Janet Driscoll Miller and its Social Media Specialist Sarah Lokitis. They will be looking at the best practice in online marketing for creating Google+ profiles and managing pages. Many people believe that Google+ is the next big thing, and cite the success that Facebook fan pages have had in boosting online marketing campaigns.

“Google+ is rapidly growing with over 100 million users so it’s a great opportunity to interact with your customers and potential leads, especially since businesses have been slow to incorporate Google+ Pages in their marketing initiatives,” Ms Lokitis said. “This allows for a great opportunity for early adopters to establish a Google+ presence before their competitors.”

The webinar begins at 19:00 GMT on Thursday 5 April.

Written by Dan Coysh

March 27th, 2012 at 4:11 pm

Posted in Case Studies,SEO

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Ancient Online Marketing Wisdom (from 2007!)

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We’re going all the way back to 2007 this week, and the original Edinburgh seminar that gave the internet the well-received 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing.

As you will see from the film, the seminar leaders have identified 13 key principles for effective SEO and online marketing, which they believe can be applied to most businesses seeking to improve their internet advertising and marketing methods. Follow the topics in the seminar video as they cover:

Pillar 1 – Keyword Research

Pillar 2 – Website Design

Pillar 3 – Blog Technology

Pillar 4 – Auto responders

Pillar 5 – Paid Advertising

Pillar 6 – Press Releases

Pillar 7 – Link Building

Pillar 8 – Article Submission

Pillar 9 – Group Interaction

Pillar 10 – Viral Marketing

Pillar 11 – Visitor Analysis

Pillar 12 – Continuous Content

Pillar 13 – The Evolving Web

 

Written by Dan Coysh

March 19th, 2012 at 3:33 pm

Affiliate Networks Are Still Lucrative For Marketing

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You will no doubt have heard that signing up for an affiliate network is a great way to make money but you may be concerned that it will be too difficult for you. If this is the case, stop worrying and start thinking about how you will benefit from an additional source of income. If you have a website, you are more than qualified to carry out the tasks you need to set up your site and have advertisements from major companies working for you, helping you to increase your bottom line with virtual ease.

Finding the right affiliate network partner is the key to success because they are the conduit between you and the companies who want to promote on sites like yours. For too long, major firms have wasted money on marketing campaigns that brought about a very limited return on their investment. This ensures that promoting on a niche or tailored site like your site far more attractive to a firm.

Making Money Online Can Be Easy
Once you have signed up with your networking partner, you will see that the process of placing adverts onto your site is a simple one. All of the relevant codes can be copied and then pasted into the relevant section of your site. That is all it takes and when you return to your site, you will see that the adverts are now in place, ready to make you money.

That is genuinely all there is to affiliate network relationships but of course, if you want to maximize your income, you can become as involved as you like. Some web publishers like to rotate the adverts on their site to keep things fresh for their guests. If a guest gets used to the same advert, it will start to blend into the background but regularly updating the adverts you place on your site, the higher the chance of guests clicking through on the link and receiving the commissions you are seeking.

Stay Fresh To Keep People Interested
Many firms also provide seasonal or limited offer promotions and these are very beneficial to have on your site. You may sign up for email updates from your affiliate network provider to be kept informed of all the latest promotions or you may decide to regularly view the network site for updates. Either way, staying up to date with the latest promotional deals can see you benefitting from the great deals and offers that firms provide while keeping content fresh on your site will keep them coming back.

There is nothing difficult or troublesome about affiliate network relationships and if you have a web site, there should be nothing stopping you from getting involved and making some extra income for very little work. More affiliate network news, tips and advice is found sprinkled throughout this website for you to feast your eyes on. Always remember to promote you affiliate network links effectively, ethically and never give up on the old school methods of promoting your offers.

Greg H, astute in many phases of affiliate marketing and criminal records reclamation, offers his unbiased opinions in every written piece. You’ll find him engrossed in his projects which include a reverse email search portal, My Free Email Search, along with a criminal records site People Search Pro.

Written by Ian Crawford

March 15th, 2012 at 4:02 pm

Google Remains the Number One Search Engine for SEO

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Cloud storage: a confused but evolving market
Creative Commons License photo credit: joe.ross

Good news for SEO online marketing this week, after a poll of Google users in Britain and the USA showed that they prefer the search engine to all its rivals.

A massive 83 per cent of respondents to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said that they thought Google was the best of its kind, with just 6 per cent opting for the second place choice, Yahoo, which is actually powered by Microsoft’s search engine Bing. Some 59 per cent of respondents said that they used search engines at least once per day – a doubling of frequency since 2004.

When it comes to online marketing and SEO in particular, these poll results show that boosting your Google rankings should remain the top priority for any business with an online presence.

However, Google needs to ensure that it maintains its overwhelming popularity. Despite its unchallenged position in the poll, respondents also spoke as one when they expressed their dislike of its recent announcement of its intention to gather all data on users’ personal preferences and online searches to tweak the search results and target internet advertising.

Written by Dan Coysh

March 12th, 2012 at 6:03 pm

Does SEM Have A Chance Anymore?

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Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization have become quite popular as businesses strive to create a solid online presence. The $16 billion industry of Search Engine marketing that includes pay per click ads and SEO represents a great opportunity for many small businesses to remain linked to their customers who may be looking for related products and services to purchase.

Even though, this is the case, there are still many businesses that are too busy with their daily business operations to pay attention to current and future trends. With that being said, below are some search engine marketing trends that are worth your attention.

To attain website visibility, it is vital to execute the latest and most effective search engine marketing strategies. In the past, link exchange was a hot commodity for many online businesses to get traffic to their website, but this has been an outdated method. Instead, businesses are concentrating on inbound links from other worthwhile and related websites. This will lead more prospects to your website because the search engines give first choice to websites that have links directed from various hosting servers. Links being directed from the same IP address will be viewed as spam.

Social media and social networking have gained in popularity as well. These are also significant to your search engine marketing strategies. It is an excellent way to connect with your targeted prospects. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are three of the most popular social media websites that you can take advantage of and will benefit from. In fact, it has become quite crucial to stay active on these social media websites. Most of your targeted social media users spend much of their time on these websites.

Going mobile is the newest development these days. So many more people are getting upgrades on their mobile devices. So, it is of utmost importance to your business to have your website included in mobile search. However, be sure to optimize your website for mobile search. Mobile search allows individuals to check their email and do other things online using their mobile device. You want to capitalize on this.

If you have a squeeze page that captures email addresses and contact information that you save in a database, then you need an autoresponder to send out email campaigns to these individuals announcing your products and services as well as special offers and coupons. Exclusive promotions that are offered to potential customers are a great way to get their attention and gain new business.

There are so many people who are using the new iPad, smart phones and other portable devices to access the Internet and to make instant buying decisions on the go. A new application included in the iPad feature called, “Lasso,” allows users to search the Internet by circling a text within an article compared to the old way of typing it into a search box.

The iPhone is also pre-loaded with Google Maps, which has information about local businesses. To maximize your exposure in various local directories and map websites on the Internet such as Yahoo Local, Yelp, Bing Local and Google Places, you must get your business listed. Google, for example, redesigned its local search in 2010 and so search results carry much more weight. Being listed in Google Place, for example, will allow you to effectively and competitively participate in your local area.

Internet marketing and the cost of optimization has risen with increased competition. Therefore, it is very important for you to know which trends need more focus in order to reduce your advertising cost online. Although we have no idea where the trends of search engine marketing will take us tomorrow, we can control the destiny of our search engine marketing campaigns today.

Greg Henderson, an astute web marketing genius with plenty of self-help articles to his name, provides you with plenty of insight through his readings. Current projects include a free background check service Free Background Check USA along with a free public records site with Public Record Sources.

Written by Ian Crawford

March 9th, 2012 at 2:41 pm

5 Easy SEO Tweaks to Help Your Rankings

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This handy video offers some small – but highly useful – tips for making the most of your SEO-based online marketing. As the host explains, small tweaks aimed at improving your SEO efficiency can be almost as useful as paying attention to the bigger strategies, since much of SEO revolves around competing with all the other sites out there desperate to clamber up the Google rankings. With large companies hard at work on the big picture, there is a lot of scope for sneaking through their defences with cunning improvements of your own. Let’s take a look at the five tips:

1. Include images – Try and ensure all images that you use work for your SEO strategy. To this end, when uploading copyright-free shared pics, change the filename, title and alternate text to match your SEO keywords. Doing this makes Google realise that the picture in question is relevant to the search strategy and helps it to show up on Google Images.

2. Decrease the number of the words in your permalink – by condensing the URL for your post and increasing its keyword density you will gain an edge over the competition, since your URL will be more SEO-optimised, and also easier to remember!

3. Consider a Google+ page for your website. Facebook fan pages are increasingly being seen as the excellent opportunity for online marketing that they are, but SEO-orientated marketers should also consider creating a Google+ page. Not only is this the premier search engine’s own social media page – and social media and sharing is becoming ever more important – but it is relatively new, and thus represents an excellent opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

4. Create a YouTube channel for your site. Videos, such as the one above, are good for SEO in their own right, but by creating a YouTube channel you can showcase your favourite videos and add links back to your own commercial site, making it all the more attractive to Google and other social media.

5. Tweak any affiliate links on your site. Ensure that these are ‘no-follow’ links, which tells Google, while crawling through your page, not to count these links when assessing the site for its algorithm. This keeps your SEO “juice” focused and sharp, and should push you a little further up the rankings.

 

 

 

Written by Dan Coysh

March 5th, 2012 at 1:27 pm

Properly Mixing SEO With Social Media

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What does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media have in common? More than you might think. Most individuals and businesses use social media as a way to get their name and voice out there in Internet-land. But unless your motives are based purely on the socializing side, utilizing SEO practices within your social media products is a more effective tool in the online game of “he who uses all the tools available, wins the page rank game”.

So how exactly do you make your Twitter tweets and Facebook posts SEO friendly? It’s very easy; just employ great information with just a tiny sprinkling of a keyword or two; nothing over the top just good content and important information. Due to the instantaneous message sending of social media, it is imperative that you get your point across quickly and simply. No messing around with keyword stuffing and by no means should you ever “spin” anything you previously posted via a social media site. That just won’t work well as posts stay up on your “wall”, so everyone will know instantly that the information is redundant.

SEO and social media are best served together by sparingly applying SEO practices within your posts. The purpose for this is in case a tweet or post becomes viral, the SEO will facilitate higher rankings for it. This will allow for greater ease in finding your popular post and increase the possibility of further distribution by followers and web surfers. Ideally, a news and information site will pick up your post and run with it.

It is important to lightly mix SEO practices with your business usage of social media; however do not go outer limits or you will destroy your credibility and damage any reputation you may have established with high quality tweets and posts.  Now that there are starting to become more means of social branching, you need now more than ever to make sure that your business has the adequate means of conglomerating SEO and social media as soon – too soon, in fact – search engines will incorporate their search queries with Tweets, wall posts and perhaps even relevant Linked In information.  If you’re simply a ‘wingman’ in your business and feel that you could boost business by combining social media and SEO, it would behoove you to talk to the boss immediately since these practices will soon be the decisive factor in who gets seen, and who will not.

It has simply been proven time and time again that combining SEO and social media will incrementally prioritize your business offerings, generate real traffic, and give businesses the steady flow of lead generation that is needed for future business.  Get on the right track and optimize your business with tomorrow in mind.

Greg Henderson, an astute web marketing genius with plenty of self-help articles to his name, provides you with plenty of insight through his readings. Current projects include a reverse phone lookup service Free Phone Tracer along with an email search site with a groovy graphic, My Free Email Search.

Written by Ian Crawford

March 1st, 2012 at 4:11 pm

Posted in SEO