I Do Web Marketing

Blogging is something that really started towards the end of the 1990′s.  It used to be a way to comment an existing webpage, an opportunity for visitors and readers to react or voice out one’s opinion on the said page.  What started as a simple commentary system has evolved into web pages of personal opinions on just about anything and everything under the sun.  Not only opinions, but there are even businesses who strictly are online with their blogging platform. As blogging continues to move forward, online advertising has tapped into the blog’s potential.  Here are 5 reasons why you should be blogging:

1. Blogging is simple. The easiest way to get your information or opinion on the net is through blogging.  No skills are required as an average adult can read and type, or at least click a mouse. If you have a PC and an Internet connection (who doesn’t?) then you can blog and advertise!

2. Blogging is authentic. In this day and age, where advertising saturate our lives, we question the credibility of promoters’ claims.  However, in blogs, things tend to have a different feel. Real people share their real-life experiences, unscathed by paid advertising.  Reading blogs about first-hand product use is like talking to people about their first-hand experience.  You definitely want to buy a tried and tested product. It’s said that if a person is unhappy with a product, they will tell 7 people compared to just 1 person they would tell if they purchased a product they liked. Now you can tell the world, either way.

3. Blogging is free. If you have the time available, blogging costs you nothing. Just write something you feel strongly about! If you are knowledgeable in the topic, then all the more power to you. Businesses are utilizing blogs as a means to stay in contact with consumers and to reach out to them on a more personable level. This type of interaction can be priceless. Even the billion dollar Google machine has a blog, why shouldn’t you?

4. Blogging builds credibility. As you get more and more into writing on a particular product or industry, your readers come to realize that they can depend on you and your posts for information.  As such, you become an expert on it; as a consequence, more readers visit your site and more bloggers link to your blogs.  If companies don’t come to you at this stage, you can start to look for affiliate to help monetize your blog. As companies and professional organizations notice the growth of your readership base, they may soon get in touch with you for advertising on your blog page, or offer to make you an affiliate, which pays for every referral generated from your blog site. On a side note, I can personally tell that I am close to launching my own affiliate program for Novel Concept Studio. I have already asked a couple of top internet marketing sites if they would be interested in becoming an affiliate and have gotten positive responses. So believe me, options are out there!

5. Blogging builds your market. Unless you are a star, or have a fortunte 500 company with hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site, chances are, only your friends and relatives read your posts.  You need not depend on them to increase your readership base.  My next post will discuss some ways in which you can build your reader base.

Have other ideas? Leave a comment and share your thoughts!

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

I just wanted to take a quick timeout and wish everyone a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

You need to be aware of people trying to scam you out of your money. It is unfortunate, but like anything else, the internet marketing field is becoming littered with scammers. The old adage, “If it’s too good to be true, than it probably is,” certainly applies.

Here are three things to watch for that certain marketers and internet marketing firms are using to attract customers:

Guaranteed High Rankings – Word straight from Google is that any search engine optimization firm that claims to guarantee rankings should raise a red flag. This is just simply not possible, and therefore should not factor into your decision when choosing a marketing firm.

Quick Fix Promises – Another rising internet marketing scam is that of a quick fix promise. Quick fixes are just simply not an option when it comes to internet marketing. Marketing a website is an organic process that takes time and constant adaptation.

Lack of Reports – When choosing an internet marketing company to represent your business, you need to understand their reporting procedures. Firstly, you want to ensure that monthly reports are sent to you showing the work that has been done. It’s your right to know where your money is going and how it’s working.

These are some of the more common warnings I can prepare you for. This is certainly not the only method in which “marketing firms” are scamming business owners out of money. I cannot recommend enough, that you thoroughly research the marketing firms you are choosing between.

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Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Search engines won’t know your pages exist, if you don’t tell them. Therefore, it is important that you let them know your website is available. This process is called indexing, and it can be argued that this is the most important aspect of your web presence. Afterall, if search engines don’t know your site or various pages of your site exist, then how do you expect search engines to know to show your website in search results?

So how do you submit your site and all of it’s content to search engines? This process is done using a sitemap. There are various tools that you can utilize for this process, if you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself. XML Sitemaps, Site Map Builder, and ROR Web’s ROR Sitemap Builder are great tools to utilize. If your website is built using the Joomla Content Management System, then I absolutely cannot recommend a better tool for this then JCrawler. With JCrawler, one simple click and you can build your sitemap and another click will submit your sitemap to the top 5 search engines automatically!

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Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Search Engines are always on the lookout for original content. This is putting more of an emphasis on copywriting, and ensuring your content passes Copyscape. Copyscape is a website that was built to detect plagiarism. Some websites and forums may refer to Copyscape as “CS.” By changing out verbs and restructuring some sentences, you can actually pass Copyscape. However, it is still a good method to detect whether your content is being viewed as “original” by search engines.

I am now going to discuss 7 tips in order to better optimize your content for B2B purposes:

1). Planning – Thoroughly planning your content is important. From the images you are going to utilize, to the message you are trying to convey, to the keywords to utilize. Another important aspect of your planning, is how you are going to use anchor text within your content for internal linking purposes. Internal linking allows you to link to other pages within your website utilizing keywords. Internal linking allows search engines to crawl additional pages on your website. Good copywriting should flow seamlessly through the anchor text.

2). Keep Your Content Focused – The goal for search engines is to provide relevant search results. This is done by their systems trying to decipher what every web page is about. It is important that you keep your pages built around it’s keyword strategy. It is not a good idea to have one page built around several keyword phrases. Instead, if you have multiple topics and keywords, it would be best to build multiple pages.

3). Page Headers/Titles - Titles for your content should be keyword rich, yet you still need to focus on creating an engaging title that draws in your readers. If the heading is engaging, but not keyword rich you can use alternative methods to enhance the keywords. Mainly, use the H1 tag and apply the keyword rich alternative title within those tags.

4). Add Captions to Your Images – Whether you write just a sentence or a short paragraph, you want to write captions for all of your images. Captions underneath images is a great location to add keyword copy. You want to use the captions as a sales pitch, yet also utilize the space for your keywords. Again, the keywords need to match the keyword strategy for the page.

5). Completing ALT Tags – Applying “alt” tags to your images is a very effective method to enhancing your keywords. These alt tags are not seen by your readers, but read by search engines. If you utilize the same image multiple times, you can vary the alt text as well as long as it matches your overall keyword strategy for the page.

6). Don’t Forget the Long Tail Keyword Phrases – Long tail keywords are an expansion upon a more generic search term or phrase. For example, if you are focusing your page copy around “televisions,” your potential customers may utilize “HD”, “Hi-Def”, “big screen” and other related search terms. These additional terms should be included into your copy. Good copywriting will naturally include these longtail keywords.

7). Word Order – Word order is not an important aspect with regards to Pay Per Click. However, in terms of SEO, word order carries significant weight. If your keyword research shows that “Sony Televisions” is searched for more often than “Televisions by Sony” then you want to ensure the more popular search phrase is more prevalent in your copy.

Utilizing all of these techniques, and focusing on improving your page copy will help to enhance the products and services you are offering.

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The I Do Web Marketing Blog has been completely overhauled. It now utilizes a Net Strife template and it’s entire focus has been reorganized. Instead of just discussing web marketing techniques and my company’s marketing process, this blog will be opened up to a broader approach. Posts will be focused on web marketing for the most part, but is now more focused on building a community. This is now a DoFollow blog to promote comments, and those with regularly posted comments will be featured in the Top Commentator’s section to the right.

The goal of this blog is to build up a solid community that will be able to feed off of each other. I am hopeful that this overhaul will help to achieve this goal.

Be sure and subscribe for the latest web marketing strategies and updates!

Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

In this day and age, Internet Marketing can encompass a variety of forms. One effective form that business owners can utilize is that of message boards, or commonly referred to as forums. Forums are a gathering place for people to communicate and share ideas. These ideas are generally focused on a particular niche. If you open an online furniture store, you can find a community based around furniture simply by using a search query for, “furniture forums.” Variations of that term can help you find more possible forums to participate in as well.

The key in capitalizing on this marketing method is finding forums that are in your niche market and becoming a part of the community. When marketing via forums, you want to ensure you read their policies and terms of service beforehand. Failing to abide by some simple forum rules, may cause you to be banned and removed from those forums.

Some forums may prevent you from posting URLS, so this can hurt your linking opportunities. However, it is still possible to attract customers if you’re offering a quality service or product. You can still draw in visitors from these message boards by posting quality and meaningful posts. Often times, you will see people just make a simple post with a link to their website. This is considered spam and should never be apart of your message board marketing process. You need to try and participate in conversation and act professionally at all times. Remember, you are representing your company in every post you make.

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