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Practice Management Tip of the Day

2010-07-13T22:59:00Z

Practice Management Tip of the Day

There's a good chance your patients have spent a lot of time at home in front of their mirrors studying their concerns, so let them do the same in your office. Have large body mirrors in each exam room. Keep magnifying mirrors within arm's reach for the aesthetic patient seated in the treatment chair and waiting for you to enter. They will examine and point out their own perceived flaws and be much more interested in hearing about your aesthetic solutions after they have studied themselves with a critical eye.

4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media

2010-06-30T17:36:00Z

4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media (check it out and if you can’t do it I can do it for you!!)

Social media is all the rage right now. You see it in blog posts everywhere. You see Twitter feeds on news shows. In the last month my mother and several uncles joined Facebook! Simply put, social media is all over the place. But is it useful for the average business?
While not all businesses will use social media the same way, I am convinced that all businesses can make good use of social media. Here are 4 ways any business can benefit from using social media.

1- Get to Know Your Audience

About a year ago I went to Blog World Expo, and one of the points that really stuck with me from that conference is this: use social media to find your audience and then hang out with them. Social media is full of groups, fan pages, and other things that make it relatively easy to find an audience that is already interested in your topic or industry.
But with all of the different social media sites, how do you find out where your audience is hanging out? Here are a couple of resources you can use:
Use search.twitter.com to see what people are talking about that relates to your topic/industry. See what they’re linking to and mentioning. This can lead you in the right direction.
Get a Facebook account if you don’t have one already and look for relevant groups and fan pages. Watch for multiple groups/fan pages for the same topic, and also watch to see how engaged the members are.
Forums are more old school, but they can be great for finding other sites that people are using to hang out. In the end it may be the forum itself is the hangout, or they may direct you to other places.
Once you’re confident that you’ve found the popular hangouts for your industry start engaging with your audience. For many businesses Twitter and Facebook are great places to start since they are so universal, but you’ll also want to look for the niche hangouts.

2- Managing Your Reputation

Social media is a great way to keep an eye on the conversations that are happening online and respond to them. In fact, many companies have employees dedicated to watching the online conversations about their company and addressing them.
Here are a few tools you can use to monitor your reputation online so you can take any appropriate action:
Once again, you can use search.twitter.com to keep an eye on any conversations going on in the world of Twitter that relate to your brand.
For general monitoring of sites, news, and blogs you can always set up Google Alerts for your brand and main keywords to see what is happening online.
For monitoring blogs specifically, you can use Technorati or Google Blog Search. Both can help you monitor what bloggers are saying about your brand or industry.
If you’re really serious about tracking your reputation you could get an account at Trackur. Their pricing isn’t bad and it can be a great solution for companies looking to check in on the conversations happening online in a quick and easy way.
Watching and managing your company’s reputation is one way that every company can and should use social media. If you notice negative conversations happening you can respond and put out any fires before they get out of control.
A great example of this is Comcast’s use of Twitter. They have turned their Twitter account into another extension of their customer service division. For some great stories about this just do a Google search for ‘Comcast twitter’.

3- Promotions

Promotion is nothing new to the internet, but it hits new levels with social media. If you push the right message through the right channels you can reach a lot of people.
The key here is that you have to already have a lot of connections, especially with people that are willing to push the information to their followers as well. Twitter’s Retweet (RT) feature is very useful for this. If someone finds a story, blog post, or promotion interesting, they can just pass it on by doing a simple Retweet.
To be successful in promoting things through social media you have to have a plan and connections. Just sending out a tweet to your 30 followers won’t cut it.
Here’s another great article about using Twitter for advertising: Is Twitter Really an Effective Internet Marketing Tool?

4- SEO and Traffic Benefits

Being that we’re an SEO Company I naturally have to talk about the SEO and traffic benefits of being involved in social media. Social media can be a great traffic generator. Admittedly, it doesn’t always generate the kind of traffic that will convert into a lot of sales but it does increase buzz, recognition, and authority for your site.
Social media is also a great way to have a lot of links built to your site. As a page is promoted on different networks people are going to be linking to it. These links will include tweets, bookmarks, and even blogs. All of these links can help improve the authority of your site and lead to higher rankings in the search results.

Putting it All Together

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, not all businesses will use social media the same. But the fact is that all businesses can take advantage of social media in one way or another. Here are a few places to start:
If your site doesn’t have a blog, you should start one. Blogs are where you’ll generate the content to be promoted on the social media networks. It is also a great way to interact with your customers.
Start a Twitter account. Having a Twitter account will give you a place to interact with your audience and also promote the articles from your blog and from other sources that you find interesting. You don’t want to be a Twitter Spammer just pushing your own stuff. Show that you can be part of the community.
Create a Facebook fan page. Facebook is one of the giants in the social media sphere, so you need to have a company presence there as another way to promote your content and interact with your audience.
Set up profile pages on a few social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious. This will give you a place to create links to your content. Make sure you also bookmark other content from your industry. Also make sure to create links back to your site in your profile.
There is always more that can be done, but these are four places to get started. For additional reading, here’s a great case study from Business.com on how they have been using social media: B2B Social Media – The Business.com Case Study

Jim Vincent
jim@web7media.net
www.Web7Media.net

What Are They Saying About Your Website?

2010-06-22T16:30:00Z

Your Website Visitors Are Talking to You

Continuously improving your Web presence to increase ROI should be the goal, right? OK, but how do you get your potential customers to talk to you so you know what to improve? If you are willing to dig into a little data, you can find out how people interact with your site and where the problems are that need attention. Here are a few pieces of Google Analytics data that you can use to interpret what your visitors are trying to tell you.

Bounce Rate

With a high bounce rate, the visitor is saying, “This site isn’t relevant to me – I’m outta here.” The bounce rate number is just the percentage of single page visits, meaning that all those people left your site without looking past the page they landed on. It’s possible that this means your landing page just isn’t interesting. More likely, it means the people landing on your site were led to believe they would find something different when they clicked on your paid advertisement or organic search listing. If you are getting a high bounce rate, look at what your ads are promising. Make sure your landing page fulfills the promise in the ad.

New vs. Returning Visitors

A high number of returning visitors says, “Your site is engaging enough that I think I’ll come back for more.” New visitors are a good indicator that more people are finding your site, but getting them to return is the part that takes work. Ask yourself what you are putting out there that will bring people back again and again. A really good blog is one great way to do this.

Time on Site

A higher time on site tells you your site keeps visitors from leaving. This could mean you offer plenty of things to explore. But be careful. When I logged into analytics on one of my sites this morning, I found most people were staying for three minutes or so. Then there was this one visit that lasted for three hours. I’m guessing that somebody left their browser open on my site while they left the house for a while. So I obviously didn’t give that visit much attention.

Pages Per Visit

This says, “The first point of contact was interesting enough to make me want to look around.” If you have high average page views, you have done a good job of sending the right people to the site and presenting the information in an interesting way. It might also mean you have created a page structure conducive to further exploration.

Traffic Sources

This is very valuable because it shows you the ways customers come to your site. If they are all coming from Google, then your Search Engine Optimization campaign is working. If you see a huge influx of WebsiteTraffic from a partner site, you could look into ways to increase your visibility on that partner site.

Content

This is where your visitors tell you which content they like best. You are also able to see how they interact with their favorite content by looking at bounce rate, how many of them left the site from that page, etc. If you notice a certain topic always trends to the top, it should probably be a main focus of your content.

The best companies are those that listen to the customer. Google Analytics provides all this wonderful data to help companies do just that. We just have to be willing to dig in a little.

Jim Vincent

Web 7 Media.net

jim@web7media.net

801.554.1620

What Does Google Social Search mean for SEO?

2010-05-26T19:34:00Z

What Does Google Social Search Mean for SEO?

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Surprise, surprise, they've done it again. That's right, the genius minds over at Google have come out with an interesting service called Social Search.

In a nutshell, it takes a logged in user's personal connections and searches through them to find whatever they're looking for. The results are incorporated right into the results of a normal Web search in the way universal search incorporates images, videos, and other content.

This is Google's response to the hyped vertical of social search, already started by companies like Aardvark (which is now owned by Google). The idea behind social search is basically to get the input of your friends, rather than anonymous Web sites. This tends to fit into certain types of searches, such as "What's a good restaurant to take my wife for our anniversary?" rather than "How many light years away is Alpha Centauri?"

Google can search through several social areas, including Gmail accounts, Google Talk transcripts, subscribed RSS feeds, Picasa, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Twitter profiles you follow.

Social Search essentially ramps up the impact that personalized search or search wiki has had. Like those services, results are tailored to your specific profile. However, unlike those services, one can likely expect this to have a bigger impact on search listings.

There may be a sizable number of users who see social results above your top 10 listing. Social Search results are usually placed toward the bottom of page one, but that will probably depend on relevance.

For SEO, consider implementing the following to expand your real estate in search results:

As if you hadn't heard about it enough, you need to have your Twitter account actively posting updates. Use keywords just like on your site, and boost your subscribers as much as possible.

Your company's other social profiles also need to be highly subscribed, actively updated sites with good content. Long-term, consider everything from Google Buzz to Facebook.

With the inclusion of Gmail, it makes sense to start thinking about optimizing e-mail newsletters. Newsletters can be posted online, or found through desktop search, so optimizing them has multiple benefits. This means no more newsletters that are one giant image.

Here's another case for full-text RSS feeds: a subscribed feed containing just the first paragraph or so of complete articles will have fewer opportunities to rank and drive traffic.

Not to sound like a spokesperson for Google, but you can sign up for this experiment in Google Labs and start trying it out today. It's simple to use, which means this service should take off.

There's no need to tell Google anything if you use Google Reader, Gmail, Profiles or other Google services. Also, there's no need to use a separate search service to do social searches – the results will simply start showing up one day in your old standby Google. With a little effort, hopefully some of these results will belong to your sites.

Powerful SEO Content: Understanding Breadth of Coverage

2010-05-26T18:49:00Z

Powerful SEO Content: Understanding Breadth of Coverage

Nearly every SEO has been on this end of a conversation: "The keyword we really want to rank number one for is [enter impossible keyword here]."

I often tell people they need two things to achieve these impossibly unrealistic rankings:

Proper breadth of coverage (BOC).
A time machine set to 1996.

Since the time machine requires a hefty retainer most clients are unwilling to pay, I often set my sights on obtaining BOC that will enable realistic rankings now, with the possibility of long-term growth in the future.

What is BOC?

The term "breadth of coverage" originally stems from Google patents filed in 2003. In the patent, the search giant claims that BOC is one of the factors used to heuristically solve for the most qualified news article. However, the notion of BOC extends far beyond the news algorithm and consistently impacts site rankings in the organic algorithm.

BOC is the total number of qualified web pages in a domain that are thematically/semantically relevant. More credible pages means more authority. More authority means there's a greater opportunity to rank for competitive "head" terms.

Here are four ways of demonstrating BOC to search engines:

1. Create a Logical Keyword Hierarchy

This is especially important if your website attacks multiple themes. Typically, the most general and competitive head terms used within a site should be reserved for the home page. This should make sense, as the home page is likely to have the most inbound links, making it the strongest page. Because inbound links pass rank, think of a hierarchy as a way to trickle down PageRank in a focused, keyword relevant manner.

2. Internal Linking

This is crucial in connecting the dots for Google. If your website has 50 pages of content about the Super Bowl but is unlinked, how does this benefit the user? Simply having the content under the hood of your website isn't enough; however, interconnecting that content creates a web of authority that can be easily understood by both users and search engines.

Be sure to assign each subpage a maximum of one or two keyphrases. Every time this phrase is used sitewide, send a link to that corresponding page using varied and keyword rich anchor text. Remember, the most valuable links are within the body of the text and above the fold. Footer links (especially sitewide) are frequently de-weighted.

If each page serves as a keyword representative, make sure it's reflected in the title tag, H1 tags, anchor text, alt text, and content (and yes, the meta keyword tag is dead).

3. Avoid the Need to Create a New Domain for Every Product/Service

I once worked with a Fortune 500 client that had a penchant for creating brand new domains instead of building within their massively powerful infrastructure. The reason was simple: the content publishers took their awesome domain authority for granted and figured it would magically extend to a new domain. There are perfectly rational motives for starting a new domain; it just means starting the arduous authority building process from scratch.

Working within the infrastructure of your most powerful domain can greatly expedite the ranking process while eliminating the time and resources it might normally take to rank. This is also a more preferable long-term strategy as brand favoritism is a continued trend in algorithmic tweaks. Your website doesn't have to be exclusively dedicated to patio furniture to rank number one on Google, but it needs domain authority and breadth of coverage.

4. Create Powerful Content

This entire exercise is relatively moot if you stuff pages with low quality content. Authority documents tend to fare much better in search engines because they provide a full picture of a subject matter. Detailed, well-linked content is one reason Wikipedia thrives in search engines. Whenever you create content for a targeted keyword, focus on dwarfing your competitor in quality, depth, and scope.

Wikipedia sets a high bar in demonstrating breadth of coverage

The most robust content contains powerful text, images, and video -- all working in unison. When writing, be sure that content:

Has keyword rich headlines.

Is at least 250 words.

Is logically chunked out with headers and bullet points (wink wink).

Has links to other relevant content.

Make sure each piece of content has enough beef to be authoritative and link worthy. Writing content takes time, effort, and willingness to fail, but it can generate relevant traffic for years.

Can Facebook Drive Great Traffic To Websites?

2010-05-26T17:36:00Z

As usual, there's been a lot of talk about Facebook lately, So I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at Facebook traffic to see what could be ascertained through Experian Hitwise data.

For the month of April, the largest downstream site visited after Facebook was Google. OK, so no shock there.

What about the second most visited site? MySpace? Really? Just over 9 percent of Facebook visitors in April stopped off at MySpace directly after checking out their Facebook accounts.

To put that in perspective, only 0.7 percent went to Twitter (although that doesn't count those who use Twitter clients, only those who use Twitter.com).

Now, 19.48 percent of MySpace users head to Facebook once they're done on that site (making MySpace the fourth highest upstream site from Facebook, behind only Google, Yahoo, and Yahoo Mail), so there's absolutely a good degree of back and forth between the past social media champion and the reigning champ.

The third most visited site after Facebook is another Google property, and shouldn't be a surprise. Yes, it's YouTube, with 6.44 percent of visitors heading over there to watch the latest in viral videos. Again, there's reciprocation, with 9.35 percent of YouTube visitors heading over to Facebook once they're done watching Miley Cirus blend an iPad or whatever they've been viewing.

Further down the list, in 19th place, 0.32 percent of visitors went to ESPN, and 0.31 percent went to Plentyoffish.com. For ESPN, the data shows that as being 12.93 percent of their incoming traffic, 1.3 percent points higher than their Google traffic; for Plentyoffish, that's their second highest upstream site behind Yahoo, with 15.26 percent of traffic, 6.11 percent points higher than their traffic from Google.

Why does ESPN get such huge numbers? Having more than 446,000 people who 'like' their Facebook page doesn't hurt. From looking at their page, it seems they do a good job pushing out content that their fans like, as well as interacting with their Facebook fans by asking questions where they solicit responses.

So do these numbers show that Facebook can drive great traffic to a site? Maybe. Without access to individual site analytics, we can't see bounce rates, sign-ups, conversion rates, pages consumed, or whatever other metric we'd like to view to assess the quality of the traffic. The numbers look good, however, which says that maybe sites don't need to be as beholden to the big three search engines as we may think.

Reputation Management and SEO

2010-05-26T17:27:00Z

Using SEO for Reputation Management

First, to understand how negative press can get to the top of the search engines results pages (SERPs), let's take a trip down memory lane and revisit the old urban legend of Pop Rocks and Coke. Amidst all the excitement around the popular fizzy candy, in the late 1970s stories began to spread around school playgrounds that, when mixed with soda, Pop Rocks could cause a mini-explosion in your stomach. Teachers overheard and passed on to mothers. The worried mothers then escalated the news to the press, and soon General Foods, the creators of Pop Rocks, had a reputation problem on their hands.Even after many years of clean business practices, a single negative event can stain your brand image in the public eye for a long time. Simple things like a negative product review in a blog can be detrimental to your brand, especially when competitors are standing close by to snatch up customers. One way to combat that threat is through a reputation management strategy, which can begin with search engine optimization (SEO).

This telephone game of word-of-mouth is replicated online via link-building. First, someone publishes negative comments about your company. As others read the comments, more people start linking to it in blogs and discussion groups. Friends forward to friends, who forward to friends and so on. Next thing you know, the bad press is at the top of the search rankings.

Back in the Pop Rocks days, General Foods responded to the Pop Rocks fiasco with full-page print ads, letters to school principals around the country, and even sent the Pop Rocks inventor door to door to attest to its safety. But what could they have done had they lived in the today's digital world?

Begin by Examining Keywords

If an online reputational tragedy befalls you or a friend, the first step in the repair strategy should always entail keyword selection. You don't want to continue optimizing the same keywords that are used for existing marketing purposes. Different keywords come into play in this case. Since it is likely the negative press is showing up when consumers search under your brand name or product name, you will want to focus your SEO efforts on those specific keywords. The goal is to drive brand-friendly hits up in the SERPs, while pushing the negative press down.

You do this by creating more good press and optimizing around those selected keywords. Links embedded within press releases will give sites a ranking boost while the news is fresh and the press release is at the top of the newswire. When you're embedding the links, don't just hyperlink your corporate domain every time. Instead, ask yourself, "Which links are most important to our situation at this time?"

Experiment with different hyperlinks to different sub-domains, and measure the results to determine which ones will drive your news up the ranks. Always make sure that links are embedded on top of, or near your brand name.

Banish Negative Press through Link Building

The second step is link building. After all, if the negative press elbowed its way to the top of the SERPs through link building, you can do the same with positive press. It is an SEO ace in the hole, and it should be a major part of any SEO strategy. To counteract the negative press, build links to optimize brand and product names.

Think outside your corporate domain. Sub-domains, including news sites, corporate blogs and other pages outside your website, can be key SEO weapons in your arsenal as they take up more shelf space in the SERPs. Optimize these through link building, and make it a practice to ensure that the content on these sites is constantly updated and is as fresh as possible.

Lastly, go directly to the source of the negative press and request they also include rebuttal links. Ideally, they will publish an additional link on that post or page to your response (on your site) to the issue in question, so that your positive messages are given more platform.

When it comes to the Internet, information is a constantly flowing stream, and it flows fast. The only real news is what's up at the top of the search page, so use something that you know works to manage, control and shape those messages that you care about. SEO has a pivotal role in reputation management, as it can remove negatives and enhance positives on the first page of results, which is usually the only page that matters.

Where To Show Up On The Internet?

2010-05-18T16:56:00Z

I love it when the competition says Google is not the only Search Engine. Yes they are right because Bing and Yahoo are there and deserve some recognition BUT we all know where most of your time should be spent. That is just coming from a company that struggles with Google.

Dont let your company only SEO Market a few or even 10 or 15 keyword phrases. I have most of my clients showing up under over 150 to 250 keyword phrases! Wherever anyone looks they SHOULD find you!

10 Link Building Strategies For New Website Or Business Owners

2010-05-18T16:41:00Z

10 Link Building Strategies For New Website Or Business Owners

Believe it or not, all SEO’s were newbies at one time or another. Launching a website can be a very exciting event for an individual or new business owner. However, that excitement can quickly turn to disappointment when the site owner finds out that they are getting little or no traffic. If they are getting traffic, it is most likely coming from family members or friends who they notified through an email or Facebook.

Being involved in SEO and marketing in general, I am usually bombarded by family members and friends with questions about marketing their website or their future website on the Internet. Because of this and my willingness to help just about anyone I know, you can usually find me in a small dark corner at a family party (it has to be small and dark because my wife gets ticked when I’m not up and socializing with everyone), on the phone in the car, or answering an email, Facebook message, or Twitter message about SEO and other internet marketing tactics.

I was on a call yesterday with one of my best friends from high school. Our conversation was focused on general Search Engine Optimization principles and link building tactics that could provide a good foundation and hopefully, if he does them right, some strong rankings in the search engines. One thing I emphasized is the fact that what ever he does, he needs to build links naturally. A natural link building campaign is crucial for success in SEO.

A natural Link Building Campaign is one that is just that, natural! Getting 50,000 links within the first twenty days of your website’s existence is definitely not natural. Getting a slow trickle of links coming into your website and then building up looks much more natural. Also, getting 50,000 links pointing to your home page with the same anchor text is not natural. Vary your anchor text and include long tail versions of your keywords. You should also build links to other pages of your site in addition to your home page. All of these things help with building a natural link campaign.

In terms of links, there are two types of links you can get for your websites, external and internal links. Both are very important and can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings. I want to discuss in detail, ten ways to effectively jump-start your link building campaign.

Friends & Family Members

When beginning a link building campaign, one very natural way of obtaining links is from friends and family members. I just opened up our family blog and counted all of the friends and family who we have added in our blogroll. The grand total… 41. How hard is it to simply call up (recommended – it’s more personal) or email your family and friends who have blogs or other sites, and ask them for a link to your new website? Not hard at all! In fact, because they are your friends or family members, they will probably do it without hesitation. You can do the same thing with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

Add A Blog To Your Domain

Google loves blogs! Google loves fresh content! Google loves internal links! Internal links from other pages of your website are a guaranteed way to help you increase your rankings in the search engines. Adding a blog to your domain is a great way for you to easily add new content to your website on a regular basis. In most cases, adding a blog to your main domain is rather simple and can be done in as little as three clicks of your mouse. Web hosting companies like myhosting.com, Hostmonster, & Bluehost offer one click installations of blog platforms like Wordpress or b2evolution as does Web 7 Media.net

Adding a blog, posting to it at least once daily, and linking back to your home page and other important pages of your website with keyword anchor text is a great way to gain a lot of internal links. When blogging, you should also link out to other websites that interest you and websites that are in similar industries. You might also consider adding images, videos, polls, etc. Mix things up! Make it look natural! Most important, have fun!

Local Organizations

Just about every city in the country has a local chamber of commerce; mine would be the Sandy Area Chamber of Commerce. Joining a chamber of commerce will not only get you a very good link back to your website, but also provides networking opportunities with other local businesses. Most times, depending on your business, you can generate new leads rather easily by getting to know other individuals and businesses in your area.

Local News

Developing relationships with local newspaper writers and always making yourself available for comments on news stories that involve your industry is a great way to build awareness about your company and get links back to your website (if the newspaper is published online).

Help A Non Profit Organization

You would be surprised how many non-profit organizations are operating in your city and your state. Every one of us has been given talents and certain things that we are good at. I guarantee that there is a non-profit organization that could use your help, whether it is with designing their website or painting the conference room of their new office building. If you offer of yourself and your services freely, you can most likely ask for, and get a link to your website from theirs.

Submit Your Site To Local & Industry Specific Online Business Directories

Anyone studying SEO can usually find a blog post about submitting your website to directories on the Internet. Yes, this is a valuable link building tactic, but before you go crazy and start submitting to thousands of directories, seek out local directories and directories that are specific to your business. Submit to these first and take your time filling out all of the information that they ask for. These will be some of your most valuable links since they are so relevant to your website and business.

Social Bookmarking

You have probably heard the term social bookmarking. You have probably heard that social bookmarking is a great way to build links. Well, it is and it isn’t… You can waste a lot of time social bookmarking if you are submitting to the wrong sites. I limit my social bookmarking to Mixx, Propeller and sometimes Kirsty. The trick to social bookmarking is to not only bookmark your website, your blog posts, and other things related to your website, but bookmarking lots of different things that interest you. This will make your bookmarking profiles look much more natural to both viewers and the search engines.

Write An Article And Submit To Article Directories

Writing articles and submitting them to sites like Ezine Articles, Article City, and Go Articles, also known as article marketing, is a great way to get links back to your website. Take time to write a very detailed article about your industry and submit it to a few article directories like the ones I listed above. You will get links back to your website by properly using the author resource or bio box at the end of the article. You should tell a little about yourself and your company, while adding keyword rich anchor text links pointing back to your website.

Write And Submit A Press Release

Writing press releases and submitting them to places like PR Web or Web Wire is a great way to generate interest and buzz about your business and also to get links back to your website. This method of link building is a little more difficult than other links that you can get for your website. Writing a press release takes skill… a skill, which the average person, like me, does not have. Press releases have certain requirements that must be met, a certain format that must be followed, and in most cases, need to be super interesting. Not having any of these elements can almost guarantee that your press release will either be outright rejected or not distributed to other news related websites.

Build A Hub Page Or Squidoo Lens

Building a Hub Page or Squidoo Lens is a fun way to get links back to your website. To date, I have built 73 Hubs and 25 Lenses for my own personal websites and hundreds for clients that I have managed. The most effective Hub Pages and Squidoo Lenses are those that have at least 450 words of text about a certain topic or subject, videos, pictures, polls, and other gadgets that are easy to add. You want to make the page as interactive as possible so it provides value for anyone who happens to read it. You are allowed two links to other websites from your Hubs and a handful of links (be conservative, don’t spam) from your Lenses.

Building links isn’t pretty. But, in order to rank well in the search engines, it is absolutely necessary. These are ten excellent ways for new companies or new website owners to start building links to their websites. There are many others and I encourage any of our readers to add to this list by commenting on this post.

4 Ways your Business can Benefit from Social Media!

2010-04-28T18:09:00Z

4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media

Social media is all the rage right now. You see it in blog posts everywhere. You see Twitter feeds on news shows. In the last month my mother and several uncles joined Facebook! Simply put, social media is all over the place. But is it useful for the average business?

While not all businesses will use social media the same way, I am convinced that all businesses can make good use of social media.

Here are 4 ways any business can benefit from using social media.

1- Get to Know Your Audience- About a year ago I went to Blog World Expo, and one of the points that really stuck with me from that conference is this: use social media to find your audience and then hang out with them. Social media is full of groups, fan pages, and other things that make it relatively easy to find an audience that is already interested in your topic or industry.

But with all of the different social media sites, how do you find out where your audience is hanging out? Here are a couple of resources you can use:

Use search.twitter.com to see what people are talking about that relates to your topic/industry. See what they’re linking to and mentioning. This can lead you in the right direction.

Get a Facebook account if you don’t have one already and look for relevant groups and fan pages. Watch for multiple groups/fan pages for the same topic, and also watch to see how engaged the members are.

Forums are more old school, but they can be great for finding other sites that people are using to hang out. In the end it may be the forum itself is the hangout, or they may direct you to other places. Once you’re confident that you’ve found the popular hangouts for your industry start engaging with your audience. For many businesses Twitter and Facebook are great places to start since they are so universal, but you’ll also want to look for the niche hangouts.

2- Managing Your Reputation - Social media is a great way to keep an eye on the conversations that are happening online and respond to them. In fact, many companies have employees dedicated to watching the online conversations about their company and addressing them. Here are a few tools you can use to monitor your reputation online so you can take any appropriate action: Once again, you can use search.twitter.com to keep an eye on any conversations going on in the world of Twitter that relate to your brand.

For general monitoring of sites, news, and blogs you can always set up Google Alerts for your brand and main keywords to see what is happening online.

For monitoring blogs specifically, you can use Technorati or Google Blog Search. Both can help you monitor what bloggers are saying about your brand or industry. If you’re really serious about tracking your reputation you could get an account at Trackur. Their pricing isn’t bad and it can be a great solution for companies looking to check in on the conversations happening online in a quick and easy way. Watching and managing your company’s reputation is one way that every company can and should use social media. If you notice negative conversations happening you can respond and put out any fires before they get out of control. A great example of this is Comcast’s use of Twitter. They have turned their Twitter account into another extension of their customer service division. For some great stories about this just do a Google search for ‘Comcast twitter’.

3- Promotions - Promotion is nothing new to the internet, but it hits new levels with social media. If you push the right message through the right channels you can reach a lot of people. The key here is that you have to already have a lot of connections, especially with people that are willing to push the information to their followers as well. Twitter’s Retweet (RT) feature is very useful for this. If someone finds a story, blog post, or promotion interesting, they can just pass it on by doing a simple Retweet. To be successful in promoting things through social media you have to have a plan and connections. Just sending out a tweet to your 30 followers won’t cut it.

4- SEO and Traffic Benefits- Being that we’re an SEO company, I naturally have to talk about the SEO and traffic benefits of being involved in social media. Social media can be a great traffic generator. Admittedly, it doesn’t always generate the kind of traffic that will convert into a lot of sales but it does increase buzz, recognition, and authority for your site.

Social media is also a great way to have a lot of links built to your site. As a page is promoted on different networks people are going to be linking to it. These links will include tweets, bookmarks, and even blogs. All of these links can help improve the authority of your site and lead to higher rankings in the search results.

Putting it All Together As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, not all businesses will use social media the same. But the fact is that all businesses can take advantage of social media in one way or another.

Here are a few places to start:

If your site doesn’t have a blog, you should start one. Blogs are where you’ll generate the content to be promoted on the social media networks. It is also a great way to interact with your customers.

Start a Twitter account. Having a Twitter account will give you a place to interact with your audience and also promote the articles from your blog and from other sources that you find interesting. You don’t want to be a Twitter spammer just pushing your own stuff. Show that you can be part of the community.

Create a Facebook fan page. Facebook is one of the giants in the social media sphere, so you need to have a company presence there as another way to promote your content and interact with your audience.

Set up profile pages on a few social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious. This will give you a place to create links to your content. Make sure you also bookmark other content from your industry. Also make sure to create links back to your site in your profile. There is always more that can be done, but these are four places to get started.

Beef Up Your Website

2010-02-20T03:29:00Z

Where’s the Beef?

How to Beef Up Your Web Design

Three old ladies huddle around a burger with a massive bun and a tiny patty. “It certainly is a big bun.” says one. “It’s a big fluffy bun!” says another. Meanwhile the third stares grumpily at the sandwich and then says, “Where’s the beef!?”

She clearly wanted a real burger — not a bun, not an air sandwich, and she didn’t want to be full on just some fancy baking. No matter how good the bun looked, or tasted, it was ultimately useless without the big, beefy burger she wanted.

Similarly, this is what happens when you have designed a smashing layout with a high bounce rate. If your grids are tight, your typography is engaging, and you are getting loads of traffic, but you have a big bounce rate, then your customers are saying, “Where’s the beef!?”

No matter how fancy your site may look, if it doesn’t convert to sales, your site is lacking serious beef. A few tips to adding beef to your website:

1. Be relevant. If a visitor comes to your site expecting one thing and gets something else, they’ll leave your site with a bad taste and will likely never return. You may dress nice, but you MUST be relevant.

2. Engage users. Do this with relevant content, impeccable design and a clear call to action.

3. Provide quick value. People’s time is valuable. Make sure to give them what they want quickly or else they’ll bounce. Offer enough value so they’ll want to spend time on your site and come back again.

4. Clarity. Explain your product, how it works, what you do and why the user needs you in just a few words. The clearer your message, the quicker the reader will take action.

5. Offer Expert Advice. You can do this through blogs, white papers, webinars, etc. This lends credibility to your brand and provides a purpose behind your website. It also helps with search engine optimization by providing fresh new content, andestablishing your site as an expert in your industry.

What is the next phase? While I would argue that content is king and good content strategy accounts for 3/4 of the success for a site, the remaining 1/4 rests squarely on taking that content and making it deliverable and engaging.

You need to take that valuable nugget of information, that hamburger patty you lovingly crafted, and garnish it. Present that information in a clearly legible manner. Use practical infographics that compel the visitor to sit up and pay attention. Engage them with interactive elements to help them really understand what it is they are looking at. Make that game the most amazing thing they have played recently. Compell them. Teach them. Guide them. Don’t make them think.T

he New York Times is a great example of great content leading the way for great design to seal the deal. Apple is another but with a more product oriented approach. ESPN is a great example of a leisure brand excelling at this. This final step will set you apart from the rest. If you are not sure how to speak to your user through these means, hire an expert. There are designers out there who speak this language so well they can engage users without them even realizing it, and these subtle successes are often times the most potent.

Never underestimate solid design backing great content strategy.

This one two punch — opening with a focused quality content, and driving it home with a grand user experience — will ultimately lead you to the top of the charts on a given search engine. You will keep the users you gain, lower your bounce rate, raise your conversion rate, and leave no one questioning the substance of your idea, event, or product.

Special Giveaway

2010-02-04T16:27:00Z

SPECIAL GIVEAWAY!!!!!!!!

To All of my SEO clients;

I am giving away a brand newly built 20 page website or 1 free year of SEO to one of my current SEO clients in June of this yeaar.

Here is what you have to do to qualify.

1.Blog at least once a week (you get 1 point every week if you do)

2. Add an article to your website once a month (another point every month if you do )

3. Someway Somehow you must be actively doing SMM Social Media Marketing and have it linked to your website.(one point each month for that)

4. If you do any press releases for your website 1 point for each one.

5. You also get a point for every video you have on your site and 2 points for any new video’s or any videos of surgery.

Each point is a ticket that will go in the hat for the drawing.

All of these things are what you should be doing anyways to gain success.

On June 1st we will have the drawing and the winner we will either build a new 20 page website or erase their SEO Payments for 12 months.

The 20 page website will be the most up to date technology and the most interactvie website alive (which is what people want)

Good Luck and Thank You for being my CLIENTS!!

Getting High (no not that kind of high)

2010-01-21T17:29:00Z

Getting to the Top of Search Engines Through One Way Linking

One way links are links that point to your site from others, but which are not linked to from your website. Google and many other search engines include link popularity as part of the way they evaluate and rank websites. Links are seen as a positive "vote" towards the quality of the website. As such, the more links from other relevant websites to yours, the better.

Here are some of the ways to get one way links pointing to your website.

1. Articles

Writing articles is an excellent way for you to get free publicity. Getting an article published is free. The publicity you receive by having your article published in a newspaper, magazine or website can be worth thousands of dollars in equivalent advertising space. Well written articles yield better results than advertisements and earn you respect from customers who see you as an expert in your field.

So what exactly is an article???

An article is a short piece of information that aims to educate and inform people about something, which they may be interested in. They are usually between 500 and 3,500 words long and at the bottom of each article is a link to your website as well as a resource box about your company. An example would be my resource box at the bottom of this article. By writing and distributing these articles you are sharing information, which displays your expertise and gains you trust and credibility. No amount of advertising can gain you either trust or credibility. The best articles are 'tips' or expert pieces. People are looking for guidance and will purchase from experts who show them how to solve their problems. Writing your own articles may seem to be a daunting task, but you can get your articles written by professional writers at very reasonable costs and then distributed by various online services, such as Submit Your Article or The Phantom Writers. Also don't forget to set up "Google Alerts" so that you can see whenever your articles are published on various websites. The great thing about articles is that if your articles are well written they will spread virally, meaning that people will pick up the articles from article directories and include them on their website.

2. Videos

Over the last couple of years video has become a popular marketing strategy, as it can quickly generate traffic and interest. Unfortunately many people are still afraid to use it and think it's difficult to do. So now is the perfect time for you to get ahead of your competition. One of the major advantages of videos to traditional written marketing is that it saves your visitors a lot of time understanding what is being offered and there isn't much effort required on their part. Start the video and everything is explained to them right there and then. Hearing and seeing you tell them about your products or services has more credibility and allows you to connect to your visitors on an emotional level. Another great advantage of video marketing is that if you use the right keywords in your video's tags, you have a much better chance of reaching high rankings in many search engines.

3. Submission to Relevant Directories & Search Engines (should be done by your SEO Company)

Your website should be submitted to as many directories and search engines as possible, especially those relevant to your country or industry.

4. Blogs

A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily or weekly using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines, like Yahoo! and Google. If you use Blogger (Google's Blogging Tool), every message you post creates a new page on Google so in a very short time you could have a lot of pages pointing to your website, bringing you lots of new visitors.

5. Media Releases

Having a story written about you and your business will not only bring you lots of new customers (at no cost to you), but will also provide you massive credibility. Stories about you in the media are far more believable, powerful and attractive than any ads you could possibly run. People will trust and respect you instantly. A media release (also called press or news releases) should provide enough details to be informative, but it should leave out just enough information to be tantalizing so that the media person calls you to find out more.

SMM-Social Media Marketing

2010-01-20T16:18:00Z

SMM- Social Medial Marketing

Do you want a tremendous presence on Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn, Twitter and more? I have been doing it for a few Doc’s and can now expand to a few more. 10 hours a week for $400 a month discounted down to $300 a month. Or 5 hours a week for $230 a month. Either way you can not go wrong. Get your video’s on these platforms. Constant updates and linking. Tons of sending your name and practice out to others to get yourself seen.

2010 Online Predictions Part 2

2010-01-08T21:40:00Z

2010 Online Predictions – Part 2:

.The World of Social Media

What We Know-

• Twitter and Facebook dominate the scene, but Twitter has no revenue stream while Facebook becomes the dominating force in Social.

• Twitter and Facebook have become the way people share information, and it is affecting social bookmarking sites such as Digg.

• Twitter has redefined the way people communicate and the way search engines determine what is popular.

What We Suspect-

• Twitter seems to have reached its potential, and is going to be hard pressed to grow any further in its current form.

• In order for Facebook to retain, and increase users, keep an eye out for a completely redefined

“Group” option, or a vertical-ization of a new public section.

• It will be a shock if Twitter isn’t acquired by a larger company by the end of 2010

How Will it Happen?

(Facebook Prepares for Dominance)

One of the most important things we’ll see happen between Twitter, Facebook and upcoming Social Media like Foursquare, is definition. Social media sites will define their purpose, their existence, and their unique selling position (USP) this year.

Facebook is currently one of the strongest ways to advertise to targeted demographics and markets, while Twitter is the best way to “listen in” and distribute news, and information to the masses. As Twitter and Facebook start to better define their USP, corporate America should become more comfortable in developing marketing strategies with social media in 2010.

The first thing that will come with social media “definition” is a mutual goal with Twitter and Facebook. Both entities will make sure users understand that Facebook is not Twitter, and Twitter is not Facebook. The general public will learn and understand they are not the same thing, and there are benefits for using both mediums. By making this point clear to users, both companies should see an increase in users and interaction between users. I predict that the two companies will embrace each other, and incorporate each others’ strength. There is no better way to do this than with an official partnership, or even a merger. (As a side note, “TwitFace” could become Google’s worst nightmare.)

If Facebook (being the bigger fish in the pond) doesn’t take Twitter to be its lawfully wedded partner, then I predict that we will see some big changes for Facebook coming in the ways of “Group” and vertical-ization of a new public profile option.

Facebook’s next direction (in my humblest of opinions) needs to focus on having an option for “like- minded” strangers to connect without giving away the farm, personal family info, embarrassing photos of you that your jackass friend put up. The reason the current “fan pages” don’t work is because there is no seamless interface between you and your fan page. If this all comes to fruition then I strongly believe that we will see Twitter slowly suffer. Facebook would have serious leverage in providing and developing real-time search (RTS) abilities with the new public profile option (all enhanced by the Friendfeed acquisition), in addition to having the ability to connect complete strangers with similar interests.

Twitter will be the most vulnerable company that 53M+ users can’t live without, simply because it makes no money. Again, if a partnership can’t come together with Facebook, then the next logical option would be for Internet King Google to buy up the company so they could strictly control the RTS scene. And Google already has rumors circulating that they are interested. We will then see the most famous tweet of all time from @mattcutts: “What? It was either buy Twitter or create Gtweet.”

THE WORST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN TO SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media War: Facebook bans all Twitter language from status updates because it only comes across as gibberish to non-Twitter users.

THE BEST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN TO SOCIAL MEDIA

Facebook develops a Twitter translator that will automatically translate Twitter language into readable phrases for non-Twitter users to better understand. In addition Facebook will create a “Gaming Facebook Platform” so I don’t have to know what happens to your Farm or Mob family. Just sayin’…

The World of Search Engines..Are You Ready?

2010-01-06T18:32:00Z

THE WORLD OF SEARCH ENGINES

What We Know-

• Bing is looking to take over Yahoo! Search, making this a 2-search engine world (US Market, or larger?).

• Mobile search will grow exponentially and may become bigger than desktop search.

• Google has China in their sites, and Baidu is the target.

• Personal search tied into real-time search will show Google’s dominance in every aspect of our lives.

What We Suspect-

• Bing will go big or go home. Meaning either Yahoo people will love or hate Bing. With articles like this, showing that Bing is gaining new traffic, I suspect Bing will go big with Yahoo! users.

• Players who understand how their market uses the Internet will be providing mobile sites, optimized for (hold your breath) Google

Mobile Search.

A.- Does your site have too much Flash for Google Mobile? Full flash sites will really struggle showing up on Google Mobile but stay ok for Desktop.

B.- Is your site too big for Google mobile?

C- Is it too small?

D- Do you even know what Google mobile is? You probably have one in your hand every day. It is almost being used more often then

a desktop and shortly it will be used more then computers.

• The best way to kill Baidu is to buy Baidu, but can it be done?

• Big Brother is coming …

How Will it Happen?

Bing’s goal is to bring serious competition to the search-engine table. The only issue is Bing is trying to run the table with money: buyout Yahoo Search and news outlets, run intensive ads on TV. When all is said and done, Bing may spend more trying to buy their way into search than they actually did on developing their engine (slight exaggeration may be implied but $100 million is their rumored TV budget alone).

As stated before, I suspect that with the success Bing is having with new visitors, we’ll see some safe gains in the Bing corner. But I have a hard time believing Bing will provide Google with serious competition. Google has plans of its own.

Those plans include a growing list of future Google products and a growing list of companies it plans to purchase. (Example: Yelp is in Google’s sights, to improve local search options, but Yelp seems to be playing “hard to get.” This is how Google plays the game.)

In addition, Bing isn’t Google’s only concern. China is the largest developing market for Web use, and Google wants to be on top. In order to get there, Google will need to figure out how to handle Baidu. Even though in 2005, Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, refused to comment about rumors that Google was in negotiations to buy Baidu — leaving the world to speculate — Baidu has grown too large, and owns too much of the market to make that remotely possible.

However, Google stands at a crossroads in China. Should it continue on its current strategy, which has worked globally so far, but not with the Chinese, or does Google mold itself to fit the culture like Baidu has? In either case, I don’t think the search algorithm will change for the people of China. Ultimately, finding SEO success in China through Google should happen the same way you find success in the rest of the Google world.

Personalized Search (PS) and Real Time Search (RTS) are starting to bust their way onto the search engine scene. Neither one has struck a chord with the majority of users. I honestly don’t know of anyone out of the SEO/SEM world that has noticed the additions (even as I write this it seems that Google is reconsidering how to implement RTS). For this reason many people are beginning to write RTS off as a failure, and are predicting them to disappear in 2010. But even if Twitter doesn’t improve RTS, the caffeine update from Google proves that RTS is important. And whether we like it or not, I believe Google will place a lot of importance in developing this technology further.

In addition to PS and RTS, I believe you’ll also see more emphasis in mobile search as speculations say it could out-do computer-based search in the years to come. Overall, I believe mobile search will develop to be a major new search engine within itself. Because of the innovations from mobile devices like iPhone, and Google Android, I think you will begin to see a search engine designed specifically for mobile websites (sites that have been redone for easy viewing on those devices). The main factor that will propel mobile search as a big market is an increase in local/localized search as well (acquiring Yelp is starting to make more sense here) so that people can quickly find the store, the product, or the services they need while out and about in their daily lives.

TIME TO PANDER TO YOUR FEARS

Consider all the information we are willingly giving to Google: our email, all of our contacts, our calendar, health information, financial information and anything else found on Google Docs. Not only is this information handed to Google, but Google collects huge amount of data on our habits (that is why it is called Personalized Search). And not just what we do on Google, but what we do on websites we visit before and after using Google. Ultimately, Google is given a lot of power. Some say too much power. With all of this information being collected and analyzed, Google will begin laying the ground work for the most secretive, powerful, and threatening product ever conceived by Eric Schmidt himself. Some call it “Big Brother,” but its official title will be “Google Government …

” This post was fun. Look for my predictions tomorrow on social media, where we’ll discuss the future of the biggest social media platform Facebook, and its plans with Twitter.

Please Lower Your Sites Bounce Rate

2010-01-04T23:02:00Z

Lower Your Website Bounce Rate in 2010

A lot of people have made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight in 2010. For website owners, you might have made a similar commitment to lose some undesired thing: your high bounce rate. To make this type of resolution come true, first you need to understand what causes a visitor to bounce from your website. Then you’ll be able to understand how some simple changes can keep people on your site and result in more online sales.

Why do Visitors Bounce?

Recently, while visiting my family in Canada I was looking for a specific Toronto Blue Jays baseball hat. I visited three sports apparel stores. The first two were similar. I spent only a few minutes in each store after finding out they didn’t have the hat I wanted. Then I found a sports store that sold only hats. I spent more time in this store browsing over the large selection of hats. But they didn’t have the style of hat I was looking for, and a similar style wasn’t available in my size. So I left.

We can compare this experience to searching online. If I was searching online for the baseball hat and I visited three sites similar to those stores, the first two sites would get a high bounce rate from my visit, and the third site would have a lower bounce rate but still not convert into a sale. I would “bounce” from each of the websites because I couldn’t find what I was looking for in the same way I left each of the stores when I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

How can you Reduce Your Bounce Rate?

If you consider my example of shopping for the baseball hat, each store could have reduced the chance of me “bouncing” from the store by expanding the inventory that they carried, or by not being listed on the mall directory as a store that would possibly have the hat I wanted. If we take these concepts and apply them to a website, you will get a similar affect with the bounce rate of the site.

You can lower the bounce rate of your website if you:

Provide more products or services relating to what was being searched for: Expand your product line to include all products available to sell that are relevant to the keywords your website is ranked for and make sure your products are easily found on your site. If you sell services you can break down your services into some that are more specialized. If I offer Internet marketing services, I could offer different focused services like organic SEO services or PPC management services that both relate to Internet marketing.

Target the most relevant search terms: I have mentioned the importance of targeting relevant search terms in a couple other posts and I will mention it again. You might have a business selling tropical fish online but that doesn’t mean that “tropical fish” is going to be a good term to get your website ranked for. I could be searching for “tropical fish” because I want to take my kids to see tropical fish at an aquarium. If I found your site that sold tropical fish, I wouldn’t stay at your site for more than a second because it isn’t relevant to what I was searching for. Think of the most targeted terms that relate to your products or services and optimize for those terms.

Incorporate a clean and user friendly site design: The bounce rate can be reduced by using easy navigation and a clean, appealing design. Make the products easy to find. Links to service or product pages should be clearly labeled. Include prominent links on your homepage to top selling products or most popular services. Check your products or services pages to see how easy it was to find them and make sure it doesn’t take more than two clicks to find them.

If you have a New Year’s resolution to lower the bounce rate of your website in 2010, then these tips will help you to accomplish that goal.

May 2010 bring you success in your online business ventures.

Want SEO Help?

2009-12-30T18:39:00Z

Rethinking the Newsletter for Local SEO efforts

Most businesses of a certain size start flirting with the idea of having a company newsletter. Newsletters began as a way to disseminate information to employees when meetings weren’t practical. But newsletters grew as a way to cultivate the existing customer database.

Notices of sales, new employees, new products, location changes, community participation; these are points of interest hailed as perfect fodder for newsletters. With eNewsletters being emailed out, a convenience was placed on the poor postage meter and the content was now at the whim of the junk mail filter. Whether or not you personally like the idea of newsletters, there is something here that is very important for your SEO effort. Your newsletter is a source of content.

Content is King

Ask any web marketing guru if your website should keep having content be added and he’ll say “Yes.” Without content, your site doesn’t have much to say and the website visitor will wonder if you are actually doing anything or if the site was abandoned long ago. Not only does it make your site easier to index in the search engines you will give an edge to your thought leadership.

Unique Content is King-er King-er?

More King? Anyway, the content you come up with has a great advantage of all the repeated and shallow content that is out there. Content farms try to sell as much content as possible to as many people who will buy it to post it on their site. With ploys of promising “articles on your industry ready to go” and “look like a pro with our content,” I wonder how many times it has been around the corner so-to-speak. If you create your own content, you are already miles ahead of your local competition.

Content doesn’t have to be weighty

I remember talking to a CEO about blogging and they were reluctant on the whole idea. “What’s the point?” Well, after giving her some reasons, the whole crux of the argument came down to the writing ability and the scholarly-ness of the piece. When I told her that it didn’t have to be deep or lengthy, but addressed the topic completely from a perspective of an industry insider – that’s all she needed. It’s about having something, anything that shows the visitor that you are aware of what’s going on in your industry and you have something to say about it.

Newsletter Articles Reworked

Maybe you have an industry newsletter article about “heavy lifting” and the dangers therein. Rather than send that article to the eventual recycle pile, recover it as a page on your site. Expand on it, put 3rd party links on there. Put in a safety section that ties to other safety concerns. You have now taken a one time flash-in-the-pan article and created a page that adds thought leadership and maybe some key indexing for topics that are dealt within your business.

Don’t Archive. Display.

There was one client who archived all their newsletters online in a document format. The articles were great and could be reworked to remove any shelf life. Once it was seen that no one was looking through their archives, they agreed to repurpose the content into blogs and fill out some product pages. The eNewsletter now has a new purpose.

Website Pet Peeves

2009-12-21T19:26:00Z

THIS WAS WRITTEN BY ONE OF MY TOP SEO EXPERTS. HE WROTE THIS 3 YEARS AGO WHEN HE WORKED FOR A MAJOR NEWSPAPER IN THE US. HE WAS IN CHARGE OF THEIR INTERNET PRESCENCE. HE RETIRED 2 YEARS AGO AND NOW WORKS FOR ME AS DOES HIS SON WHO HAS BEEN DOING IT FOR 12 YEARS NOW & WAS WITH A MAJOR PLASTIC SURGERY SEO COMPANY FOR SEVERAL YEARS.

Many websites similarly drive away customers with annoying Internet pet peeves. It’s the kind of thing that kills site traffic and conversion.

Many businesses don’t even know their website doesn’t connect with their demographic, much less the human race.

So, in no particular order, here are a few Internet and website pet peeves that will cost you visitors, readers, customers, and, most importantly, money:

*Popups. These make me want to howl and then close my entire browser. It’s amazing to me how many annoying popups still exist. If you want people to stay on your page, please get rid of these.

*Intruding, drop downs, advertisements or graphics. I’m OK with ads – as long as they don’t cover the text, float across the page, or do something else extremely annoying. They often make me think my computer is coming down with a nasty virus.

*“Give us your email, social security card and bank account number to read this.” I hate it when companies hold content for ransom. Companies try to promote their stuff then try to make you give them all your contact information to get it, often in the form of registration log on pages. *However, in some instances I think it’s OK, such as Webinars, etc. For the most part, free content available to anyone is the way to go. If you want to capture emails, have a newsletter sign up box, but don’t twist people’s arms.

*Overly promotional social media updates and press releases. These make me gag a little, especially when I was an editor at a newspaper. With social media and PR, you are providing information and connecting with people. It’s for conversation and news. It’s not for exaggerated fluff.

*Ambiguous home pages. You have just a few seconds before a visitor leaves your site or clicks through it. If your site doesn’t have a clear direction, say, “hasta luego” to your potential customer.

*Confusing Navigation. If it’s confusing, I’m going somewhere else.

*Bad copywriting. Typos, cheesiness, too serious, too long, unclear, un-engaging, exaggerations, etc., will kill your website. A site is often all about the headlines, copy and call to actions. If the writing is bad, you’ll have no chance with a customer.

“Install extra software to continue.” I hate this one. I fear getting a virus, and I don’t have the time to download new software.

*Slow-loading pages. Not only is this a pet peeve, it’s also going to be big for the future of SEO.Dead links. They are dead ends that force me to go somewhere else.

*Bad colors, graphics. Some websites make me want to scratch my eyeballs out. Many designs can be distracting, and the wrong background color can make it difficult to read the text.

*Flash and sparkly stuff. Flash can be pretty cool, but not usually in a conversion sense. Sometimes designers and CEOs like flash, because, it’s cool. But, it can often be flashy without any substance, and as a result, waste the viewers’ time. Some sparkly design stuff will make your site look like a used car sales floor. That is never a good idea.Ineffective site tools. Why do people launch websites that don’t work? Why, why why?

*MUSIC! Music on the homepage makes me do a mad scramble for the “X” button like it’s my full-time job to close out browsers. Music, and videos for that matter, that play without my approval, is a bad, bad thing.

Internet marketing is all about two things: (1) getting more traffic and (2) converting that traffic into sales.

That involves good SEO services, and a website designed around simplicity, easy flow, clear direction and good content. Everything on the page should propel the user experience. If it doesn’t, it will make my pet peeve list.

Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies for 2009

2009-12-09T18:13:00Z

Web 7 Media.net Announces the Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies of 2009

December 9, 2009

The best Internet marketing strategies of 2009 revolved around establishing credibility and targeted exposure. The search engine optimization company says similar tactics will work in 2010.

In response to an eMarketer.com study stating that businesses will spend up to 75 percent more on Internet marketing this holiday season, Web 7 Media.net– a full-service Internet marketing company in Salt Lake City – announces the top 10 most effective Internet marketing strategies of 2009.

“Businesses want to make sure every penny goes to something that produces results,” said Jim Vincent, chief executive of Web 7 Media.net. “For that reason, more and more money is being allocated to Internet marketing because it’s measurable and has proven to increase ROI.”

There are a wide variety of Internet marketing methods, the most effective being the ones that establish credibility, trust and directly target a demographic. “Credibility is the most important,” said Jim Vincent. “When people are watching their money closely, they will only buy from companies and Web sites that they trust.”

Credibility, Buckles said, depends on how well a site is architected, how many other sites and networks link back to your site, how much social media and buzz surrounds a domain, how often a site goes down, how unique a site’s content is and how fast a site loads.

The Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies of 2009:

1. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Web sites in the top of the search results are viewed as the leaders of their industry, and more than 80 percent of Web users click on the first listings. Good SEO services will consistently deliver a huge return on investment.

2. Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn – Social media marketing engages customers on a personal level, and can rapidly create buzz around a product, brand or business. In 2008, Pubcon search conference spent $75,000 to marketing their conference. In 2009, Pubcon saved that money and used strictly social media advertising with great success.

3. Keyword Research – Everything revolves around discovering what words and phrases your customers are searching for online.

4. Video Marketing – This is becoming more important both on-site and off-site. Videos help convert Web site visitors into sales. In the universal search results, people tend to click on links with videos more than those without – even if the video link is ranked lower.

5. Online Public Relations – This builds credibility online, in the mainstream media and for potential customers. Online public relations can help create a lot of buzz about your site through bloggers and industry sites, and can boost organic SEO.

6. Link Building – A key element in search engine optimization. Search engines like “popular sites.” From the search engine’s point of view, a credible and popular site will have a lot of links pointing to it.

7. Blogging – Blogs provide additional site content (which search engines love), graphics and other viral content to disseminate information and tie in with social media. Blogs can build your credibility by establishing your site as the hub for industry information.

8. Conversion Web Design – A good Web design will keep visitors on your site and sell them products or services. In the end, it all comes down to a site that makes money.

9. Paid Search Marketing – Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an extremely targeted strategy with measurable, immediate results. This enables a more efficient spending of marketing dollars.

10. Email Marketing – Nurture relationships and retain existing customers. It’s much easier to keep old customers than to get new ones. Send good offers and valuable information that’s customized to their needs.

“To have success on the Internet, you need a combination of all these strategies to drive traffic to your site, establish credibility of your brand and convert traffic into sales,” Jim said.