I Do Web Marketing

It’s not a job that most people like or have an aptitude for; it’s seen as pushy, demanding and in-your-face; and it makes people revile you if you don’t take the right approach. But no matter that marketing is associated with all these negative aspects, it is one job that reaps you rich rewards if you know what your targeted customers want and how to adapt your marketing strategy to each of them accordingly. To that end, you must avoid the following irritants when you’re marketing on the web, because they’re the ones that turn off your customers and make them never want to even look in your direction again:

• Pop-ups: This one ranks high on my list of irritants; imagine trying to get to the information on a site only to find your sight blocked by a large pop-up that has a barely visible close button – whether you’re pressed for time or not, you’re definitely not going to look at the advertisement. This is because it’s in your face and you don’t want marketers shoving offers at you when you’re actually there for something else. So if yours is a site that annoys with pop-ups, you can bet that people are not going to be making too many return visits.
• Unrelated text: If you’ve ever run a search string through Google and been directed to a site only to find that the pages are gibberish with keywords littered among the text, you’ll know what I’m talking about. SEO is necessary, but not to the point of conning visitors to your site. Your keywords must be seamlessly integrated into your text (and that’s where good writers come in handy) instead of just being thrown around at random here and there. If your site flatters to deceive, it’s more an irritant than a good marketing tool.
• Distractions like music and videos: While video slows down the speed at which the page loads, audio is distracting and startling most of the time, especially if the environment is formal and quiet too. So use these forms of media only when necessary, and when it comes to audio, allow your visitors to switch it on when they want to hear what you have to say.
• Opt-out schemes: Marketers think they’re being smart by getting customers to stay with them using opt-out schemes – for those in the dark, with these schemes, you’re signed up for a service automatically and if you want out, you must go through the long rigmarole of finding the relevant link and unsubscribing yourself. Most people don’t have the time or the patience to do this, and that’s why marketers take advantage of this scheme. But when your mail continues to arrive unsolicited, it does not endear you to them.
• Complicated websites: And finally, you may think your site looks good and works wonderfully, but if it’s too complicated for people to use, they’re not going to come back. So make your design simple and easy on the eyes, make choices and navigation relatively straightforward, and give your customer what they want rather than what you have – that is the key to good marketing.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Shannon Wills, she writes on the topic of Internet Providers . She welcomes your comments at her email id: shannonwills23@gmail.com.

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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+!.

Email marketing has long been a staple of the online marketing landscape, and now with the advent of social media marketing, businesses can take advantage of those email subscriber lists to build a fan base for Facebook and Twitter pages that might otherwise take some time to create. Integrating both realms into a single marketing strategy can consolidate your marketing efforts and provide results that might be unattainable using only one or the other. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Use your email provider’s existing capabilities to integrate email with social networking sites.

Many providers already have options that make it easy to post an email newsletter on your existing Facebook page. This is an easy way to keep your Facebook page fresh without having to generate double the content and you’ll also reach a larger audience than you would through email alone.

• Talk about your newsletter on Facebook and Twitter.

Update your status to give your fans a taste of what will be coming on your next newsletter. You can get them excited about it even before you have it written. This is also a great way to get more people to sign up for your newsletter. By providing a link to your website where they can sign up, you can increase your circulation and at the same time remind current subscribers that a new installment is on the way.

• Search Facebook and Twitter for newsletter ideas.

Using the search function to find existing conversations about your business or product can reveal what customers are saying, both good and bad, and provide ample material for future newsletters. By addressing actual concerns expressed by people who may or may not follow your Twitter and Facebook pages, you can build loyalty and trust among your potential customer base. Once you have an idea for your next newsletter topic, post it on your status update and mention that you’re addressing a specific concern.

• Include opt-in links on your social networking site posts.

Every time you post new content on your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages, you should give viewers an opportunity to opt-in to receive your newsletter. This alone can increase your mailing list substantially. Don’t make viewers search for ways to find out more; make the link obvious and invite them to take action immediately.

Whether you are a fan of social media sites or not, they are a marketing opportunity that cannot be passed up if you intend to build your business in today’s online environment. By merging your email and social media strategies, you can instill greater brand recognition and loyalty among customers while ensuring that your marketing messages reach the largest audience possible.

What are some of the ways you are currently integrating social media into your email marketing campaigns?

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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+!.

Internet marketing has become an essential component of the overall marketing strategy for many businesses. Possible marketing venues have mushroomed as social network sites and search engines provide new opportunities to reach broad audiences. Online advertisers in the U.K., however, will soon find themselves under the same regulations that TV, print, and paid online advertising already operate under. As the U.S. considers following suit and even going a step further by restricting the ability to collect data, companies must ask how the new policies might affect them in the long term.

Privacy Issues
A key component of online advertising is collecting data detailing a web user’s internet search habits and the sites they visit in order to create targeted ad campaigns. Websites use cookies to monitor user preferences and create a more personalized online experience. Most sites already detail their information gathering practices in their privacy policy, but some companies have been less than forthcoming regarding the extent to which a user’s information might be used. Nearly everyone agrees that an individual user’s privacy must take top priority. The question, then, is whether ensuring privacy should be the job of the federal government or whether the industry should continue to self-regulate. Proponents of regulation argue that greater accountability is needed to keep companies from using personal information illegitimately. Experts in the industry express concerns, however, that regulations put in place by an oversight bureau would be unable to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, handicapping a company’s ability to take advantage of new advances while still adhering to the regulations. Companies such as Google and Yahoo have already stepped up to the plate by introducing opt out buttons that allow a user to decline cookies and remove any tracking software that has been placed on his computer. Additional concerns address whether online marketing as we know it could continue to operate without the ability to discern user preferences. Less targeted advertising could mean significant reductions in ad revenue and conversion rates, producing a ripple effect with ramifications for the entire marketing industry.

Could Regulation Hurt Businesses?
Government oversight of communication always raises concerns about freedom of expression. Regulations that begin with an effort to protect citizens from hateful or deceptive marketing could quickly cross the line by restricting views the government finds distasteful. In addition, increased regulations would need greater revenue to support the regulatory committee, which could easily lead to higher taxes. Since many small businesses rely heavily on online marketing, regulations would need to be sensitive to the ability of these businesses to comply without hurting their profit margins.
Protecting the consumer from privacy invasions and exposure to unwanted advertising content must take top priority for the online marketing industry. If the government becomes involved in the regulation process, however, there will need to be guidelines put in place to ensure that businesses are not hurt by the new policies.

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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+!.

Theming Thursday is a weekly feature on the “I Do Web Marketing” blog dedicated to various themes that you can use for your business or personal website. Every Thursday will have a different choice of themes, centered around a particular CMS. For the foreseeable future, we will be highlighting Joomla and WordPress related themes, as well as email templates. These themes are available for purchase and provide your website or email newsletter with a fresh, modern look and feel that is desired by your website visitors and customers, which will lead to hire conversion rates. These will not be the end all be all of conversion and SEO, but they will point you in the right direction.

I have hand-picked the following three email templates for you to check out:

Email Template #1
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Email Template #2
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Email Template #3
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Stay tuned to next week Theming Thursday edition as I will be rolling out three more hand picked themes for you to utilize. Do you have recommendations or themes you’ve developed? What do you think of the themes I have handpicked?

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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+!.

Small businesses need to make the most of every advertising dollar. Understanding what marketing trends will be most successful in 2010 can help your business soar above the competition, while ignoring those trends could leave you floundering.

Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to head the list of online marketing strategies. New aspects in 2010 include personalization and greater relevance. As you develop your SEO strategy this year, dedicate some of your resources to developing content that targets niche audiences. You’ll also want to keep your web content up to date since search engines will begin factoring publication dates, geo-locations, and social media content into their relevancy algorithms.

Social network marketing will continue to rise in popularity in 2010, but you’ll need to fine tune your strategy in order to use it to best advantage. It will no longer be sufficient to maintain a Facebook or Twitter page. You’ll need to take the next step and use it as a vibrant forum in which to engage current and potential customers in meaningful conversations.

Mobile marketing has exploded and continues to rise in popularity. More people now have access to cell phones than to cable TV or home computers. Small businesses need to take advantage of this burgeoning market by creating mobile apps and by instituting location-based marketing techniques.

Video blogs are the blogging method of choice in 2010. Millions of web users view online videos each day, and while video blogging may not replace the text version, still, companies can expect an increase in the number of viewers who want more than pages of text about their products. Videos are highly shareable, and are more interactive than text; consequently, they have the potential to attract more loyal groups of followers than the more traditional written blogs.

Building your web presence should be a key leg of your online marketing platform in 2010. It’s no longer sufficient to maintain your website, Facebook page, and Twitter page. You’ll want to make your website visible in as many venues as possible including blogs, Youtube, Yelp profiles, and email newsletters. For instance, videos that appear on your website but nowhere else online will fail to reach a large portion of your target audience due to the web user’s tendency to search one centralized site such as Youtube for any videos on a given topic. If your video doesn’t appear on Youtube, then for that viewer it may as well not exist.

Online marketing trends in 2010 will expand on the succession of new marketing outlets that appeared in 2009. Using your advertising dollars effectively means putting them towards the venues that will produce the most return on your investment rather than continuing to invest in trends that may be dying out.

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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+!.

In the early days of the internet, search engines ranked websites based upon simple keyword density. Sites that contained higher percentages of a given keyword appeared higher on the search engine rankings than sites that had fewer incidences of that word. The problem with this method, however, was that it allowed website builders to stuff their sites with keywords in order to achieve a high ranking while providing low quality content. Internet users were the victims in this scenario since they would have to search through many links before finding one that provided the content they were looking for.

In order to combat this problem, new algorithms were developed that allowed search engines to search websites for content quality rather than just looking for specific words or phrases. This method of searching, known as latent semantic indexing, allows sites with quality content that use keywords in a more natural way to rank higher than sites that stuff articles with keywords but provide poor quality content. In other words, search engines now evaluate articles by considering the quality of the content rather than simply the incidence of keywords, more as a human would.

For the average website owner, this means you should build your site around a particular theme rather than simply trying to achieve a specific keyword density. You should use not only that specific phrase, but also similar phrases arranged in a natural format. Search engines rank your site by comparing it to other sites on similar topics and analyzing the related words in order to determine how helpful the content on a particular website is likely to be. If you use only one keyword or phrase, the search engine will have a more difficult time determining what the topic of your website is and you’ll be less likely to receive a high search ranking. There are obviously a ton of other factors involved when giving their rankings, but you want as many things going in your favor as possible!

Understanding latent semantic indexing allows you to provide content for your site that seems natural to you while at the same time making sure you can be found on the web. It’s still a good idea to determine a keyword for each article on your site. However, rather than trying to work the keyword in wherever possible, you can write in a natural style while still keeping your overall theme in mind.

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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+!.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—these are names that have become buzzwords not only among consumers but also among business marketers. In today’s online marketing environment, companies that have not developed a viable social marketing strategy fall leagues behind their social media savvy competitors. Now is the time to develop and implement a social media marketing strategy that will put your name in front of audiences and help increase not only brand recognition and loyalty, but also trust.

Your primary goal when developing a social marketing strategy should be to establish conversation parameters. You cannot possibly control the direction of every conversation, nor should you try to, but you can be available to answer questions and provide honest and helpful input wherever possible. People visit social networking sites because they want to have conversations that don’t involve sales pitches. In order to gain trust, you’ll need to create an environment in which potential customers feel free to express opinion without fear of being censored, but also in which you can provide responses to negative comments that help viewers understand the reasons behind your company’s actions in any particular area. When appropriate, you can point readers toward your product, but in such a way that they feel you are providing useful information rather than pitching your company.

Facebook and Twitter provide the logical starting place for your social media strategy. If you don’t have accounts at these two sites, create them as soon as possible. By doing so, you’ll reserve your company username and gain instant access to millions of viewers. Evaluate the presence of your competitors and begin building a platform from which you can provide information about your company to your target audience. The next step in your social media strategy should be to create a company blog. Determine what issues are likely to be important to your target audience and blog about them. Creative content and excellent writing will help you build a loyal audience that will share your blog posts with friends and attract more readers to your site.

LinkedIn offers business networking with millions of users. If you’re not a member, sign up immediately to begin building a network of contacts that can help you promote your business. Work toward receiving recommendations from customers and colleagues on your LinkedIn account, since these can help you gain credibility and increase your search result ranking. LinkedIn is especially beneficial for those who are B2B.

Once you’ve built the base for your social media strategy by creating the accounts above, it’s important that you become active in other venues around the web. Participate in other people’s blogs and keep an eye out for mentions of your company or service at other sites. Set up Google alerts for your company and/or your name and respond to comments that are made about your company or product. By maintaining an active presence on the web, you can build customer loyalty and trust while gaining a greater audience for your company’s services and products.

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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+!.

This post was written over at Noble Samurai and touches on a topic that I am asked regularly. With their permission, I am re-posting this here as it is a very relevant topic in today’s web marketing world.

There is a common misconception that in order to develop a successful online business you need to be targeting hundreds or thousands of keywords.

This perception often causes a great deal of confusion and can lead to ‘Analysis Paralysis’ as people spend months analyzing keywords looking for the perfect opportunity. As a result they never follow through to create a complete and profitable business.

Last week, a group of us were discussing this problem and came to the conclusion that the reason this misconception is still so prevalent is that in the past, focusing on quantity versus quality DID actually work.

In the early days of Internet marketing, if you placed a large number of related keywords on a page or included them in Meta and Alt tags you could often get rankings that led to traffic.

Similarly, in the early days of Google Adwords, it was possible to load your account with thousands of keywords and generate a steady stream of traffic to your site.

However, while this may have been the case in 2003, it is very important to realize that THINGS HAVE CHANGED.

The old approach was a ‘shotgun strategy’ in which you targeted a large number of keywords, took a shot and hoped for the best.

With the continuous improvements in search engine algorithms and the development of quality metrics such as Google’s Quality score, this approach is no longer effective.

The mantra of “The more keywords the better” is a thing of the past.

The alternative to the old shotgun strategy is a new ‘laser like’ approach in which you explore your market carefully and then zero in on a small subset of specific keywords.

To understand why this laser focused approach is so important we need to examine something we call the ‘Iceberg Principle’.

According to the Iceberg Principle, finding a good keyword is just the tip of the Iceberg.

In order to transform a keyword into a genuine asset for your business, you need to undertake a range of tasks that most people unfortunately never get around to.

These tasks include:

On-page optimisation

Off-page optimisation

Obtaining high quality backlinks

Writing articles

Conducting targeted PPC campaigns

Etc.

The truth is that every one of these activities requires time and effort. Clearly, if you are trying to target thousands of keywords, following through on these activities becomes virtually impossible.

So, instead of generating lists containing thousands of semantically related keywords, here is the laser focused strategy that we recommend in today’s SEO environment.

To get started, use Market Samurai to generate a sample of keywords in your niche and then continually refine and filter these keywords until you find 5-10 keywords that have the following characteristics:

(1) They are highly relevant to your niche

(2) They have reasonable levels of traffic eg. 100 visitors per day

(3) They have acceptable levels of competition eg. Less than 30000 competing web pages

(4) They have low strength of competition ie. The top 10 sites in Google are not well optimized

Once you have identified and selected your target keywords, redirect your focus to the on-page and off-page SEO tasks necessary to transform your keywords into genuine traffic-generating assets for your business.

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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+!.

In May, Google added the Show Options feature to it’s search results pages. It wasn’t until earlier this month that Google launched more ways to utilize it’s search engine. Services like Facebook and Twitter offer real-time search capabilities, which poses a threat to Google’s results.

Google has proven time and again though, they don’t just sit on their hands. So, they are introducing ways in which they can enhance their results. This is done with new search features that give you the ability to search for results in the past hour, by date range, previously visited pages, not yet visited, and by Google’s Book, Blog, and News search tools.

How to Access The Google Search Options

Another cool feature that came out earlier this month is the integration of Google Trends into natural search results. The following screen capture will be displayed at the bottom of SERP’s, when you search for a trendy topic:

Google Trends integrated into natural search results.

This Google Trends integration is only for users in Japan and the US. Google Trends and the new search options are just the latest updates to Google’s search engine, but we’re sure to see many more enhancements in the coming months.

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+!.

It seems I am running into more and more people who have been burned by bad SEO firms. Now, as I previously discussed, there are certainly plenty of bad SEO people to watch out for. However, you can do yourself a huge favor by preparing some questions for your prospective SEO providers. This will allow you to gauge how knowledgeable they truly are on the subject, and give you a better feel for what to expect.

Before engaging in ANY discussion with an SEO provider, you should have done your research first. Ask yourself, how did you find this prospective SEO provider? Was it through a search engine? Was it through a social media platform such as LinkedIn? If you found them there, chances are they have an idea of what they are doing. Pull some analytics on their website. Run their website through HubSpot’s website grader and see some information about their website. There are other analytical snapshots you can review as well such as www.quarkbase.com to get some quick information. This will give you an idea of who you are engaging. If an SEO firm cannot represent that they are ranked highly themselves, then what makes you think they can do it for you?

Now, once you have done your due diligence, these are the questions you should be asking:

How long have you been in business?
You should know the answer to this provided that you have done your due diligence. Now it is just a matter of them being honest with you.

What keywords have you attained ranks for?
This is important, because you want to know that the keyword campaigns they build are legitimate. An eight word keyword phrase is not difficult to rank for, so pay close attention to this.

What keywords do you feel my site should be ranking for?
If this is your first conversation with them, then a respectable SEO firm should have to get back to you after they do some preliminary research. They might be able to quickly go through your site and give you some keyword ideas off the top of their head. Match whatever they give you up to the research you have already done.

What is your SEO process?
Shady SEO people will dance around this question. Or they may even claim that it is a trade secret. This should throw up caution signs. Respectable SEO’s should never have a problem explaining their process to you.

Is my industry competitive?
You should have an idea on this before you engage in discussions with an SEO provider. There are a ton of factors into determining an industry’s competitiveness. A general rule of thumb is to look up a keyword query in Google and look at the number of results. You will see a number on the top right that says 1 of 10 of X, where X is the total number of pages that are relevant to the search query. Now, this isn’t always 100% accurate of a term’s competitiveness nature, but it gives you an idea. If your primary keyword has less than 500,000 results, and the SEO firm tries to tell you it is a very competitive industry – then you will want to proceed with caution.

Are you working with anyone in my industry?
This is important, because you don’t want your SEO firm to be targeting the same keywords with you as they would with someone else. Most SEO companies will not offer industry exclusivity without charging higher prices for it. You should be able to provide an SEO Firm a list of your competitors that they agree not to work with while under contract with you.

Do you require changes to my site?
If they answer “no” to this question, then this should throw up caution flags. On page optimization is absolutely necessary and is the second step of a campaign (after the research). Some SEO firms require that you make their recommended changes. Respectable SEO firms will handle this themselves and make the necessary behind the scenes changes. They should not be changing your website design unless you have a specific agreement in place with them to do so.

What will you be doing besides working directly on my site?
Again, if they answer “no” to this question, there is cause for concern. The on page optimization is only PART of the SEO process. If they are not building links for you, then you are not gaining credibility in the eyes of search engines. All SEO campaigns should include a link building process.

How long will it take to see results?
An SEO firm that tells you it will happen in days, is one that is most likely using very shady tactics. These shady tactics could result in having your website removed from Google’s index. The truth is, no one knows for sure. It isn’t up to SEO firms to dictate this, search engines do. Usually you will need to wait 2 to 3 months to have an idea. If absolutely no improvement is made by 90 days, then you will want to investigate this a little further.

Can I speak to references?
Some SEO firms do not provide this information. They should always be able to show you something and allow you to speak with someone regarding the work they have performed.

And just for fun…What kind of a relationship do you have with Google?
Absolutely NO ONE has any special relationship with Google. Those that tell you that they do are full of it and you should end the phone conversation immediately and never consider their services.

I hope these questions help business owners from making a bad decision. You can avoid putting your business in jeopardy by doing your homework beforehand. If you have other questions, share them in the comments!

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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+!.