On Page SEO – Keywords, Content and Site

For your site to have a great ranking you need to consider not just the meta data, but also take into account the actual content you add to your site and the site layout in general.

Keywords

We have already gone over the importance of having interesting, regular content added to your site. However each piece of content you create should also have a purpose.

Once way to do this is to create content that includes relevant keywords throughout the copy. The two main things to consider for this is density and placement.

Keyword Density

Basically you need to have your keyword appear enough times to make the search engines recognize it is important. Google recommends a keyword density of 1-2% and Yahoo recommends a keyword density of 3%. If you go too much over it may be considered ‘Keyword Spamming’ and will probably harm your SEO efforts.

The best way is to write high quality website copy that is entertaining and engaging. The art of SEO writing is nowhere near as valuable as it once was.

Keyword Placement

This is more important than your keyword density. It is a good idea to have you keyword in:

Title tag of your website
Header area of your copy (H1 tag)
If possible also bold the keyword in your text to emphasize them – as long as it looks natural.

Having your keywords or key phrases towards the top of your copy and very close to each other (just a word or two apart) will make them appear to be significant in relation to each other.

Outbound Links

Yes incoming links to your site are important, but did you also know that outbound links are also just as important. These links act like a vote from your site towards the sites you are linking to, however try not to go too over boards and only include a couple of links per page. It is also important to use keyword rich anchor text, and to only include links that are relevant to your site’s subject matter.

Like everything SEO related, if you go too over board with outbound links by having too many, or include ‘spammy’ / unrelated links you can seriously harm your brand. If you have a blog with a comments area try to make them all ‘nofollow’ as Google will see you are trying to not include them in your page.

Links are normally dofollow which means search engines like Google sees them and will take note of the page you are linking to when working out your SEO ranking. Nofollow is the opposite and tells the search engines that you do not want these links to be indexed with your site. Basically you are not voting for the page the link goes to.

Images

Search engines can not tell what an image is so they have to take a best guess by using the detail you provide them. This means they are a very effective SEO tool. Rename the image to your keyword, add in the alt text / description / title of the image.

Note that these descriptions are displayed if a user mouses over the image – or if the images do not load so make sure they are still natural and of course not spammy.

The Sitemap

Every site should have a sitemap. A site map contains a list of every page on your site, and can contain details of how often a search engine should crawl them (i.e. how often you update them). Google and Bing both use sitemaps to help them find all the pages on a website, and also to get an idea of when to re-crawl old pages.

Adding a sitemap is one of the easiest ways to ensure that your content is being checked by the search engines on a regular basis.

Your URLs

Make sure that you URL (or URL slug) makes sense and are ‘pretty’. Again it should be relevant to your page, contains your keyword and makes sense. The url is generally displayed underneath your result in the search engine results page so the keywords and text that you enter is very important.

In the long term, the ranking and traffic benefits of having attractive URL slugs will pay off.

Internal Links

The last thing to consider is internal page linking. If you create a piece of content that relates to another piece already on your site, take the time to cross-link them. This is great for SEO but is also important to help with your actual engagement. If a person is reading your text and sees a relevant link going to another relevant area on your site, they will probably click to read it as well.

Make sure you do pay attention to the text you use on this link – try not to make it say ‘Read More’ instead use the new articles keyword so Google can again see how it relates to your site

If you need a hand with getting your on page SEO correct get in touch. It is one of the most important things you can do to make sure your site succeeds

What is On Page SEO?

Do you want more web traffic? Are you failing to reach your ideal online customer base? If you think that your online success could do with a boost, then you may want to start by improving your SEO.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is first and foremost about making your website easy to find. By following a number of fairly standard steps you can ensure that your site has a prominent place in the search engines when prospective customers carry out a search for the things that you’re selling. The important distinction here is that your site needs to be reaching people who are searching not only for your business, but also those who are searching for the products or services you are selling.

If your business sells French Provincial Style Furniture it is important that the search engines recognise what your business is about, not just your business name. SEO helps to pinpoint key word phrases that your customers use to search with. This ensures that your website is correctly indexed and ranked to reflect its relevance to the phrase being targeted. A good outcome from SEO is that your site will rank highly when a potential customer runs a search using a targeted phrase (e.g. ‘French provincial style furniture’).

SEO helps to clarify what your site is about, so that when a search engine comes to index your site, it does so correctly. Through good SEO practices, you’ll find that your site moves up through the pages; ranking more highly for appropriate phrases. Your site then becomes easier for prospective customers to find.Some of the simplest steps can make a big difference to how your site ranks; which, in turn can have a big impact on the amount of traffic reaching your site.

Boosting your search engine ranking for the most appropriate phrases will also ensure that the traffic you receive is largely from qualified visitors to your site. When your webpage ranks highly for appropriate, targeted phrases you’ll be able to not only increase the numbers ofprospects on your site, you’ll be confident that those who do reach your site will be genuinely interested. Having a large number of visitors is somewhat pointless if they land on your site and then leave less than 10 seconds later. Relevance is a big part of SEO and it ensures that your web traffic consists of a greater number of visitors with a genuine enthusiasm and interest in your products and services.

How to Get the Search Engines to Send Thousands More Customers to Your Site

At its most basic level, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing and promoting a website in an effort to boost the number of visitors coming through from the search engines. The majority of your visitors are expected to arrive via the popular search engines and SEO configuration helps to boost visibility when users search for your particular product or brand.

SEO comes in many forms, and there are relevant factors such as the words used on your page or the way other websites link to you: in some cases SEO simply means the designing and structuring of a website in a way that search engines can understand.

But in addition to discovering specific phrases and terms for the engines and building proper links, SEO isn’t just focused on the engines; it’s also about making sure the sites are better for people.

If you’re trying to figure out the whole SEO thing but find yourself more confused, don’t stress, you’re not alone. Hopefully we can help you to understand SEO better and how it will result in more profits for your business.

Why Does My Site Need SEO?
As we mentioned earlier, the majority of web traffic originates from a search query in the search engines.

What makes search engines so unique is the fact that they can provide targeted traffic, which means that you can directly draw in people who are specifically looking for what you offer. Once you understand that search engines are the roadway that facilitates all this, and learn how to make sure your site is found by popular search engines, you won’t miss out on the many marketing opportunities made possible by search.

A search query is the phrase a user types into a search box in order to find information about something, so your website needs to be configured in a way that its anchor text aligns with relevant search queries. For example if your website sells wedding dresses then it would be very important to make sure your website gets displayed on the search results when someone types in a query relating to wedding dresses.

When site owners invest in SEO, it leads to an impressive return on investment. It really does have the potential to significantly boost your rate of return when compared to other forms of promotion and marketing.

Is it true that search engines can’t “see” my website without SEO?
Modern search engines are pretty sophisticated and use advanced algorithms to search for sites when queried but they still need assistance in order to crawl the web more deeply and provide users with the best results for each query. Remember that while there are proven SEO strategies to make sure your site gets thousands of visitors every month, the wrong SEO can get your site buried deep in the search results where no user will ever come across it.

Aside from making sure content is available to search engines, good SEO also enhances site rankings in order to make sure content is placed only where common searches will locate it. You might have noticed how competitive SEO marketing is, and companies that invest in SEO will have a huge advantage over their peers.

How do I do SEO for myself?
SEO is fairly complex but once you understand the basics, it makes a huge difference. There is a lot of information about SEO available on the Internet and it can be accessed for free.

Depending on the time you have for learning this information and the type and complexity of your website, you may find you need an expert to handle things more smoothly. There are hundreds of experienced firms such as ours out there practicing SEO. We assist many local businesses just like yours and will be delighted to provide an SEO solution for your business.

How much time should I invest in learning SEO?
If you are serious about improving your search rankings and be familiar with SEO then it would be advisable to put in time and effort into it. There are three main factors you need to pay attention to:

• On the page SEO
• Off the page SEO
• Violations

As you will learn, within each group exist subgroups and each of these subgroups contains individualized SEO factors that you as a site owner should pay attention to.

Effective SEO factors have to work in combination. No single factor will be successful so it wouldn’t make sense to focus on creating a great HTML title if the content on the page is low quality. Likewise having hundreds of links can boost rankings significantly but that only works if they are quality links. Establishing multiple factors can increase the chances of success just as negative factors make it harder to achieve success.

On the page ranking factors
On-page search ranking factors are those types of factors that fall under the publisher’s control. Consider the type of content you publish, perhaps you provide a number of HTML clues that make it easier for people and the search engines to ‘see’ your website, and perhaps you’ve spent time creating effective site architecture to help the search engines. All these factors fall under on-page rankings and are within your control.

Off the page ranking factors
These are the factors that publishers do not directly control. A long time ago search engine developers learned that relying entirely on publisher controlled signals wouldn’t work so in order to yield the best results they had to gain more control. For example, some publishers may try to make themselves appear more relevant that they actually are.

Due to the high number of web pages in existence, search engines cannot rely on ‘on the page’ clues. The engines need to go through more signals in order to yield the perfect result for any specific search.

Violations and penalties
Understand that search engines want publishers to perform SEO on their pages because it can improve their search results. Major search engines such as Google provide assistance in the form of simple guidelines, videos and how-to posts as a way to encourage good SEO practice and make it easier for their users to find your site.

But despite all of this training, some publishers still engage in “black hat” techniques as a way to get to the front of the line and for this they get punished. Engaging in spam or black hat SEO tricks can get your pages penalized and the ranking dropped; in some cases the website can get banned from the search engine entirely.

These violations are basically little tricks that web developers use to exploit search engines into giving a higher ranking, usually by manipulating the search engine’s understanding of true authority and relevancy.

It sounds very confusing. I need time to think about it.
Although it sounds daunting at first it can be learnt, but most businesses simply don’t have the time to do this as they are too busy running their businesses. However, we need to stress that businesses can’t afford to snooze when it comes to perfecting their SEO strategy. This is not meant to scare your into action, it is just a simple fact. It needs to be done if you want your business to stay ahead of the competition.

However, because if it so important we can understand if a business is sometimes reluctant to hire an outside company to handle their SEO strategy. You might not want to give up direct control of this critical component of digital marketing, or you may be looking to reduce your costs.

However, there are even more compelling reasons you should outsource your SEO rather than keep it in-house (or even worse, decide not to do it altogether). Outsourcing has five main advantages that make it an appealing option for businesses:

1. No More Waiting

When it comes to running a business, there are a lot of items that take priority over SEO on your to-do list. Due to its complexity and ever-changing nature, many businesses put SEO off until the company has the time and resources to handle it properly. But the longer you wait to handle it, the further you’ll fall behind your competitors. They will be getting the sales that might otherwise have gone to you. Outsourcing SEO can help push up the timetable without sacrificing other projects.

2. Keeping up With SEO’s Constant Evolution

Unfortunately, SEO isn’t something you can just set and forget. Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorithm each year and if your company lacks the resources to stay on top of it, then it will prove ineffective or even damaging in the long run.

For example, when Google changed its algorithm to crack down on SEO tricks focused on short-term results, one company lost 20 percent of its search visibility overnight. If it had hired experts to follow these announced changes and implement above-the-board SEO strategies, the company could have maintained its search market share and even used the algorithm change to its advantage.

3. Making More Money

Perhaps like many businesses, you worry that paying someone else to do something for you is going to end up costing more money than just handling it internally. In reality, it’s different for each company.

To put things in perspective, what are the costs of doing it on your own, and what are the results you expect? Where are you positioned in search engines today, and what is that ranking costing you in new sales?

While it may cost more in the short term to hire externally, the ROI from increased traffic will often put you ahead.

4. Gaining Built-in Expertise

While your company may have employees who know their way around SEO, it’s unlikely that they’re as experienced and knowledgeable as people whose companies like ours do it for a living. SEO agencies have clients in diverse markets, with deeper and wider exposure to the impacts of algorithm changes and other search-centric issues. They’re also paid to stay on top of every change and trend in the search business. Spending your resources training employees to be experts internally, rather than outsourcing, can waste both time and money.

5. Focusing on the Big Picture

How can good SEO benefit your business? By letting someone else handle the details of SEO, it frees you up to concentrate on the results and how they can contribute to the growth of your business. SEO agencies live and die by the results they return, so their goal is to deliver the results you want so they can stay in business.

While you still might decide to handle SEO internally, it’s important to consider both options and choose the approach that works best for your business. Assess where you are in the SEO game, and determine whether you need help.

Do you have technical SEO issues? Are you suffering from content issues? Do you have a bad backlink profile? Is the way your website is set up actually harming your SEO?

You may not have the answers to these kinds of questions yet, but you can start to wrap your head around the problems you might have by hiring a partner to audit your strategy. This is also a good way to vet an SEO agency without committing to anything for an extended period. You need to know that the company understands your business and knows what kind of results you want.

How Not to Harm Your Rankings and Lose Sales
Remember, SEO is not a short-term game. You have to be in it for the long haul. That is why we are so keen to work with you. Our focus is on strategy, not on quick results and easy guarantees that is offered by other companies, which actually harm your ranking in the long term. We can help put you ahead of your competitors, both online and off. Don’t put it off. Act today. We look forward to working with you.

Outrank Your Competitors and Make More Sales…Your Guide to Building Links for Top Search Engine Rankings

So, you’ve built your website and you’re ready to take orders.

Then the reality sets in and you suddenly stop and think, “How do I actually get people to my website?”
You need search engine traffic to send people to your site and search engines such as Google and Bing want to send potential customers actively searching for your products or services to your site. But first they need to know that you exist. Building links to your site is one way to put your site on the radar.

What Is Link Building And Why Are They Important To Search Engines?

The Basics

For a long time now search engines have been using links as votes, which represent the web’s opinion on what pages users find relevant and useful based on popularity.
After years of programming development, the search engines have mastered and refined the use of link data, where complex algorithms are put in place to create nuance evaluation of websites based on this information.
Links are not the entirety of SEO, but most search experts agree that huge portions of search engine algorithms are designed around link-based factors.
By using links, the engines can determine a site’s popularity in a specific niche based on the number of pages linked to it and when this information is combined with other metrics like trust and authority, the search engines assign a rank for the website.
Trustworthy sites usually link to other trusted sites while those suspected of being spam-type sites get the fewest links from trusted sites. Links are a great way to establish the validity of sites and information on any given subject.

What is Link building?
Link building refers to the process of getting external pages on the internet to link to your own website to give it more relevance and credibility.

The more important and popular a website is, the more the links from that website matter.

For example, a popular site such as Wikipedia has thousands of different websites linking to it which means it’s probably an important and popular site.
In order for you to earn popularity and trust with the search engines, you need assistance from other link partners. The more important the site, the better.

 

The Fundamentals of Link Building
Link building is one of the most challenging parts of SEO but also the most important to success. In order to succeed in link building you will need a decent budget, confidence, and more importantly, creativity. Each link building campaign is unique and the way you choose to build your own links will depend largely on your website as well as your personality.

Your strategy should fall under one/or more of these types of link acquisition:

Natural or Editorial Links: These are a type of links which websites and pages give naturally in order to link to your own content. Natural links don’t require any specific action from SEO, apart from the existence of good quality content and the ability to raise awareness about it. The useful content you provide, the more people will link to it, resulting in more visitors to your website.

Outreach or Manual Link Building: Outreach links are created through personal effort by contacting bloggers and sites and that offer complimentary products or services (but are not in competition with you) for links, spending money for listings and submitting websites to popular directories.

Self-Created Links: Many websites encourage visitors to create links through blog comments, guestbook signings, user profiles and forum signatures. While these links only offer small value in the long run, they still have an impact on a number of websites. But generally, search engines tend to devalue these types of links and they’ve been known to penalize websites that use these links aggressively.

 

As with any successful marketing effort, you need a strategy and realistic goals. But before you embark on a link building effort you should probably take time to read and understand the many elements of a link as used by search engines and how those same elements factor into the valuing and weighing of your links.

There are a number of search engines on the Internet and those search engines use links in a variety of ways and have their own unique algorithms. We might not know all the attributes considered by the engines but through proper analysis and hands-on testing we can get some valuable indicators and results of what they are looking for.

 

Here is a list of the most notable factors worthy of your consideration.

Professional marketers consider these factors when measuring the value of a link and a site’s link profile.

Topic-Specific/Local Popularity
This concept of “local” popularity was first used by the Teoma search engine and it suggests that links originating from websites within a topic specific community carry more weight than links from other general off-topic sites. Let’s say for instance your website sells wedding dresses, and you earn links from one of the many wedding and bride discussion forums online, the links would matter more than earning links from an off-topic site such as a dog breeding forum.

 

Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink and is one of the strongest signals used by search engines when ranking sites. If a high number of links point to a specific page with the right keywords, then that page will have a higher probability of ranking well for the keyword used in the anchor text. This can be observed with searches like “Click here”, where a significant number of results rank mainly due to the anchor text of inbound links. Instead of just using the words ‘click here’ to send them to a specific page on your site, it would be much more effective for the search engines if you had the words “Click here to view our full summer range of wedding dresses” or words to that effect relating to your website.

 

Trust Rank
The Internet is filled with spam. As much as 60% of web pages are in fact spam, so search engines have to find a way to weed some of this content out. They do this by measuring a site’s trust with the link graph. When a site earns links from high-trust domains such as government websites and non-profit organizations it boosts their score in this particular metric.

 

The Link Neighborhood
Spam links mostly link to other spam sites. Spam goes both ways and search engines look at all of these links so they can understand which “neighborhood” the website falls under. Therefore, it’s a good idea to be selective when you choose sites to link to and also when you attempt to earn links from a site. If somebody promises to provide a thousand links to your website in a short space of time be very wary.

 

Social Sharing
Social media has seen an explosion in the amount of content moving through different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. The rise in social sharing has led Google to incorporate social signals in search results in an effort to serve personalized results. Some of these personalized results are not included in the first page but they still get promoted because of the surging social influence.

When individuals share a lot of material across different social platforms, search engines don’t treat all of these socially shared links the same way they do other links. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t notice them. There’s been heavy debating over how exactly search engines factor in social links into their algorithms but its obvious social media channels are have huge significance and importance.

 

Freshness
You may not have known this but link signals decay over time and websites that were once hugely popular go stale, eventually failing to earn new links. Because of this, it is crucial to keep earning new links over time. Search engines use the “Fresh Rank” feature to determine a site’s freshness and judge current relevance.

 

An aside on backlinks
Bing and Google have been trying to discount the use and influence of paid links on their search results. Obviously it’s not possible for them to detect all paid links, they have been putting in a lot of time and resources into formulating ways to detect and discredit the practice. If you get caught buying links you risk severe penalties that will probably kill your rankings and send your site to oblivion.

 

The Importance of Backlinks for Your Website
When you look at it in terms of building your site or blog, you will find several important factors which play a part in your overall SEO plan:

Search engine ranking: It’s the main goal for most marketers and website owners and one of the ways this is achieved is by creating quality links to your pages. The key here is to create a variation of anchor texts and get it from niche blog or high quality blogs and websites.

Fast indexing: After creating a brand new website, the next challenge is getting indexed quickly by Google; but having backlinks from an active website tends to expedite this process.

Page rank: If you get linked back from good quality PR sites then quite possibly you will get a decent page rank in subsequent updates. One of the many ways to find out how well your site ranks on a search engine is to search for one of the key phrases targeted by the page. For instance if you want to rank well for a phrase such as “diet pill” then it would help if you earned links from pages that already rank well for that particular phrase.

 

Time and Effort
It takes a lot of practice, effort and experience to establish these variables as they affect your ranking but you can always use one of the many web analytics to find out whether your campaign is gaining traction. You know the strategy is working when you see an increase in search traffic, frequent search engine crawling and better rankings, among other things. If you don’t see a rise in these metrics then it’s possible you need to work on your on-page optimization or pursue better quality link targets.

 

Increase Your Profits
The world of Internet marketing changes so fast and there are now more businesses than ever competing in a very different online landscape.

Companies of all sizes that want to compete for customers online have to be smart if they are going to stand out and grab their share of the colossal opportunity open to every perceivable market.

We don’t want your business to be left behind. If you don’t have the time or inclination to manage your online marketing campaigns, please contact us today and we will be very happy to show you what a difference we can make to your online profits.

How to Avoid 10 of the Most Common Internet Marketing Mistakes That Could Seriously Harm Your Businesses

Times have changed. The new frontier for marketing is no longer traditional media of print and television. More and more small businesses are now taking their business online because that is where their customers are.

Although it presents some new challenges, it also has huge advantages for small local businesses because compared to traditional marketing, the barrier to entry online is very small. That is why so many start-up business take this route as it is much more cost-effective and they can easily reach their target audience.

As a business owner, there are many different strategies that you can follow for a successful online marketing campaign depending on your niche, budget, and time frame but there are some fundamentals that you need to follow.

Marketing is all about creativity and figuring out new and exciting ways to get your message across. This is article will help you avoid the most common and typical mistakes people make.

Internet Marketing is constantly evolving but the basic principles of marketing stay the same. The only difference is that the internet has provided such a different channel in which your company can express itself that sometimes requires a whole new learning curve.

There are 10 basic mistakes that all small businesses need to avoid. Some may seem obvious but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people are avoiding them, so let’s start with number 1:

Mistake #1: Having no vision and mission
Most major companies have a mission and vision statement. It clearly states the goal of the company. For example, there is this one from Apple Computers “Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.” Apple’s innovations such as the IPhone and IPAD make use of this particular statement as the driving force behind their success.

Even though your small company isn’t nearly the size of Apple, you have to remember that even Apple was just a small operation in Steve Job’s garage at some point in time. It is never too early to have a strong mission and vision statement. Your business needs to have a strong foundation in order to grow.

Perhaps you are wondering what this has to do with your online strategy and marketing. Well if you have got a clear vision of your business from the outset, it sets the right foundation for you to build your business on. If you don’t have this then you will have a very hard time fixing the next 11 mistakes which will only harm your online success.

Mistake #2: Not understanding SEO
What is SEO? SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization’ and is a crazy arms race between the website owner and the search engine algorithms. The SEO’s goal is to ensure that you rank highly in the search engines when users search for your particular product or service. It takes a lot of knowledge and expertise to keep up to date with what the search engines are looking for from website owners. So should you just ignore the whole problem and not care about SEO at all? Definitely not. That would be a disaster!

SEO is all about optimizing your website. What does this mean for your website? The SEO will optimize your website so that when the search engine web crawlers come along and search your website they will do so on a perfectly optimized site and reward your by ranking you highly in the search engines so that your potential customers can find you.

So you can see how important SEO is and why your business needs to invest in it. Consider how much more traffic and sales you can generate if you feature on the first page of the search engines on your chosen key word. Googling something is almost second nature and the average person will only take a look at the first few links. So not investing in a SEO expert is a mistake that your business can ill afford.

 

Mistake #3: Not blogging about your business
You might be thinking, “Well I already have a website so why do I need to blog about my product or service?” It’s a good question and here is the answer why: Blogs are an extension of an individuals or companies influence on-line and can have a huge impact on the success or downfall of a product or brand. Some blogs literally can make and break products because of their reviews. Blogs like Perez Hilton and Huffington Post have made internet celebrities out of their creators so don’t underestimate the power of the blog.

When someone is looking for what’s in and what’s not in fashion they read the fashion blog. When people want to know where the new hot destination is they read a travel blog. If they want to see what the hottest new mobile phone is they read a tech blog. In fact, they probably look at your website first than when they see a product they like they look at the blogs to see the reviews.

So you need to get your voice heard. You need to be the advocate and push the message you want out to everyone. One of the best platforms to tell people about your product is through your blog. In the blog you can become one of the influencers out there.

However, make sure you do a few things first: make sure that your blog is hosted on the same site as your domain. That way your visitors will know it is an official blog. If you are blogging about a certain niche like technology for instance, you cannot sound like one big advertisement pushing your products. What you need to do is spend time writing about things that people want to hear about. Your content needs to be informative and engaging.

You also need to interact with your bloggers. So when they comment make sure that you respond to them. That means that you need to respond to both negative and positive comments. This will show potential clients that you care about your product and those who are buying from you.

 

Mistake #4: Not being social enough
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google + are all social networks and are great places to do your marketing. Some businesses who don’t understand the importance of social media feel that Social Networks are a waste of company time. In fact, when they think of social media they are thinking of ways to block it and increase worker productivity. Don’t make the same mistake. What you can do is tap into social media to rapidly expand your internet footprint without spending too much money.

It’s vitally important for your business to invest in good social marketing as they can drive a lot of traffic to your site. Some of the more savvy companies have even started to address their customer service concerns on social media sites.

Creating an online community where people who enjoy your product can come together is also a big win. Creating fan pages, linked in accounts or even tweeting on a regular basis shows that you are connected to your customers and followers and tells them that you are hip and modern company who cares about them.

The best part about social media marketing is that it is mostly free. None of the major social media sites will charge you to create a site even if it is commercial in nature. You can also build your profile quickly with a minimum of investment and even use graphics that you have already created for your website.

Social media marketing needs to be consistent so you either need to invest in staff or outsource the work to get somebody to monitor your social media or do it yourself which can be time consuming if you also run a business offline business too. Once you are involved in social media you cannot really just leave it alone like a static website.

If you do put a member of staff in charge of your social media accounts you will need to ensure that they are up to date with the new developments in the company as this where people will often go looking for news. Consider creating a corporate communications function and depending on the size of your company make it a department or a single person.

Often you have to address concerns on the social media sites and it is also a good place to check on feedback for your company. So learn to use social media to gauge where you are in the market and what people really think about your company.

Social media along with mobile marketing is incredibly valuable to your business so it is not something that you can afford to ignore and it will have a significant impact on your company profits.

 

Mistake #5: Not cross promoting with other sites
Once you have built up a reputation for yourself, you should really take a look at into cross posting or guest authoring with another blog with a similar related product. Remember that your reputation is a resource and that cross pollinating ideas is a good way to grow your network and get new customers.

Sites that may not be your direct competitor but is in the same industry would be a good target. Also review sites or blogs that might be on your area of expertise might also be a good option. But whatever the case it’s important that you utilize this opportunity as much as possible.

One thing that this helps develop is name recognition not only of your product but also of yourself. It lets people know you are an authority in your field and gives them confidence in your and your product. So you should always consider your knowledge as a resource and make sure that you share it with as many people as possible.

Another benefit is that you can link back to your site which also increases the relevance and reputation of your site especially if the site that linked to you is older or more established than your website.

The downside to this is that you actually have to be a pretty good writer and write about relevant things that will interest your target audience. So you can’t just pump out a 250 word article that just summarizes other articles. Most reputable site wouldn’t take them and those that do will give very little benefit to your marketing strategy. It might even have a negative effect and should be avoided.

 

Mistake #6: Not creating ‘raving fans’
There are happy customers and there are raving fans of you and your business. Can you make a customer so happy that they will be a raving fan who will generate excitement and sales for your company?

The best way to do this is have a testimonial page on your blog or website. It’s a perfect opportunity for your company to leverage on the good will of the customers by having them post their good experience on your website. Even better is when they submit positive reviews on your business on third party sites. For example, if someone is so happy with your product that they put a 5 star rating on Amazon. What this means is that whoever sees that becomes curious and might even try your product.

These happy customers might even create blogs about your products and create a loyal following. Customers who love your product are the best ambassadors as they will refer their friends and family to your product. The most important thing about this is that they are doing this because they are truly happy about their product and they are doing it for free.

So make sure that you create more customer advocates, as they are free and their word will really help convince people to visit your site and try your product.

 

Mistake #7: Not creating an affiliate network
Online advertising can be an expensive and inconsistent means of driving customers to your website, but there is an alternative. Affiliate marketing can boost traffic to your site and you only pay for visits that result in sales. An affiliate program a process by which you make an agreement with other website owners or individuals who want to promote your goods or services online – or vice-versa. It means you can make sales from third-party websites, or ‘affiliates’. However, you only pay for the conversions the affiliate generates – in other words every customer that actually buys from you.

One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is that it enables you to broaden your customer base outside your own web-marketing efforts. It is all about getting in front of an audience that you may not otherwise reach. Hotels, for instance, could use a number of affiliates such as car hire firms, flight companies or travel insurers which share the same target market to promote their site.
Once successfully up and running, affiliate programs can generate between 10-30% of total sales so it is well worth setting up (this is something that we can help you with).

Affiliate schemes are also cost-effective as they work on a cost-per-action basis, meaning that you only pay on seeing results. So, unlike advertising, you do not incur any costs until a sale is actually made.

 

Mistake #8: Having no referral program
When you have a customer who is happy the first thing you have to think about is, who does he or she know that will also enjoy your product? On rare occasions and depending on your type of business the customer may offer to introduce you to their friends and family and boom you have a customer advocate. However, on most occasions, you need to ask the customer if they have referrals.

When a customer either receives the product or service it is the ideal time to have a questionnaire or survey for them to fill out and to ask is there anyone that they can introduce you to. This can be sent by email, web form or done through social media. In most cases if the customer was happy with the service or product they would be happy to introduce it to their circle of friends and family.

So make sure that happy customers have a system where they can easily refer new clients to the company. You can even reward them with incentives but either way referrals are a great way to improve lead flow.

 

Mistake #9: Not using YouTube
Most major companies and corporations use video marketing to create viral marketing campaigns before the release of a big movie or product launch and YouTube is the platform of choice. It is huge.

Surprisingly, very few small businesses realize the potential that you tube has. You have to remember that Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube and many of its videos can reach up to 3 million hits. So why don’t businesses use YouTube more often? They are missing out on a powerful free marketing strategy.

 

Mistake #10: Having bad customer service
A lot of companies spend all their money on developing the right product. Yes, having an awesome product and marketing will sell initially but having terrible service will almost guarantee that you won’t get repeat customers. Not only that but each unhappy customer will tell three other potential customers about their bad experience and make it even harder to expand your market.

Great customer service might even cover up for an average product. You need to have multi-channel customer service and a thriving online community with people willing to help. For example, you would need someone to answer calls, answer emails, answer chats and answer questions posted on the forum. Covering all these channels is only the beginning. You now need to ensure that the service is excellent.

As a company your customer service is a reflection of who the company is. Just by adjusting the company to be more customer focussed you should be able to improve the customer experience and make sure that people come back for more. Don’t forget one of the biggest costs is acquiring customers. So once you have customers why lose them?

It’s just the beginning
Internet marketing can be hard work and it does require investment of both money and time but the return on that investment is enormous. However, if you avoid these 10 potential pit-falls, you will find that it doesn’t have to be difficult nor does it have to be expensive. What you need to have is the drive, the inspiration, and the creativity to think outside the box and create something new that people flock to – or have a team behind you that can do these things for you.

Your business simply cannot succeed without marketing, so it is important that you invest time and money in your online marketing campaigns. Products just don’t become huge hits by themselves. Clever marketing campaigns just make it look easy.

The Internet is constantly evolving, and it pays to keep up to date with the changes. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to do that yourself, why not get in touch? We specialise in helping businesses just like yours to succeed online with tailor made marketing campaigns that will drive new customers to your website.

Google’s Latest War on Guest Blogging

 

Are you guest blogging? If so, stop! Despite what everyone has told you, it’s horrible!

Well, okay, now it’s horrible. In Google’s never-ending quest to drive internet marketers crazy, as it turns out the once widely touted practice of guest blogging for link building purposes is now considered taboo. In Google’s own words, guest blogging now falls under the “little or no original content” section.

 

What Caused this Change?

Exactly what brought this change about is still officially a mystery, but most signs point to the fact that Google has been going after webscrapers and other duplicate copy for quite some time now. Guest blogging should have seen this coming, but then again, who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Google!

 

The bottom line is that Google is on a quest for completely original content, even if the links are canonical. Just try to stay away from anything that can be considered “little or no original content.” Article spinners, beware! Your days are numbered as well!

 

 

What Does this Mean for Guest Blogging?

As of right now, Google is penalizing guest blogging networks pretty heavily. This seems to be where the brunt of Google’s ire is falling right now, but the “weak guest blogs” by lone guest bloggers are also feeling the heat. Just like a fire starts at the bottom and burns upwards, you can expect this heat to rise closer and closer to the top, soif you are in any way, shape or form guilty of weak guest blogs, we suggest cutting some ties pretty quickly if Google’s penalization worries you.

 

Of course, some people will still guest blog and some might get away with it, but risking a Google manual penalty isn’t worth it in our opinion. That’s up to you but let us just remind you what happens when Google gets you in its sights: you show up on page four of the search engine result pages even if someone types in your exact website. So, what can you do instead of guest blogging?

 

 

What Can I Do Instead of Guest Blog?

Instead of guest blogging, fall back on the timeless classics of internet marketing. Content marketing is still the big dog, just think of guest blogging as a flea on that dog that’s been removed.

There are still plenty of hairs for you to scratch off including:

– Creating extra-awesome content for your own blogs. Why do you need to be on other people’s blogs in the first place (yes, we know, for traffic). But still, the point remains: if your content is that good and interesting, people will come to your blog. Focus on making your blog the best it can be and make your site a place where people say, “Man, if only we could still guest blog, I’d want to guest blog there!”

– Community and niche participation. If you still feel that the best way for you to move forward with your marketing efforts is to branch out laterally into the bigger communities and sites in your niche, instead of guest blogging, start becoming active in the forums and on the posting boards. You can always leave links to your own blog on a topic in the commentary section. Just because guest blogging is gone doesn’t mean your presence outside of your website has to disappear.

 

The bottom line here is that if you have been guest blogging, sorry. You’re going to need to find some more creative ways to market yourself into an existing audience. If you haven’t been guest blogging, great, don’t start.

Why Everyone Needs a Website

Why Everyone Needs a WebsiteOnline marketing – now there are two words that are enough to strike fear into the hearts of those looking to promote themselves or their businesses! It is definitely a scary concept, especially if you have limited knowledge of how the Internet works but it is one that you can ill afford to ignore.

As a valued customer of WebShot Designs we have put together a bundle of information to ensure you get the most out of your new website

You have already taken this first step and by doing so you have joined the third of NZ businesses that have a website. (Yes latest figures show an estimated 60% of the countries businesses are yet to set up an online presence)

By having your new website you already have a huge advantage over your competition and by the end of our course you will be harnessing the true power of the internet to make your business grow to new heights

EVERYONE needs a website

It is as simple as that. A business card, advert in the local newspaper, mobile phone number and email address just will not cut it if you are looking to get ahead. No, those times are long gone.

Why you need a website?
Whether you are self employed, work as a freelancer in your chosen field, are starting up a company or have an established business, you need a presence online for a number of reasons, some of the most important of which can be found below for you:

It is the easiest and most cost effective way of promoting your business.

 

Setting up a website is not complicated and it will save you money. Think of all those brochures, letters and marketing materials you would have to pay to print otherwise. Why spend all that money when you can direct people to the online version, which is much cheaper?

You can create the right first impression. A website acts as a shop window for your business so you can control exactly how the customer sees you. You can establish a professional reputation right from the start!

You reach a much wider audience with an online presence. Think about it – anyone from anywhere in the world can find your website so if you sell products or services then you can generate a much greater clientele.

You are accessible to customers and potential customers 24 hours a day, whether you are awake or not, so your website is effectively working for you when you are asleep.
As you can see, it is essential to have a website and now that you have You will soon find having your own website is a lot of fun, as well as making great business sense of course!Your website and online marketing

However, although this email has given you reasons WHY you need a website it has not covered the most important point of all – HOW to use it for online marketing purposes when you have your website up and running.