December 2009 Archives

Build Your Business: How to Establish Your Expertise

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Website Marketing
on December 30, 2009 7:25 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
As a business owner you have an expertise that you can use to build your online brand and to market your business. Being seen as an expert in your field gives your customers added reason to trust you, and it can strengthen your brand and attract well-informed customers to your business. In this article, I'll explain what is involved in marketing yourself as an expert and how you can start doing it today.

Before we begin, it's important to understand that establishing yourself as an expert isn't something that will happen overnight. It is a process that takes time and is the result of consistent work -- it's not something you can do today and forget about it from there. However it is something that can immeasurably benefit your business and, it's you can and should start working on today.

What's Your Expertise?

When marketing yourself as an expert, you must first determine your area of expertise. It should be something you are already knowledgeable about so you don't need to do lots of research or learn new skills. It should be directly relevant to your business and be useful to your customers and prospective customers.

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3855371

Emotional Motivators in Landing Page Optimization

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Website Marketing
on December 29, 2009 7:49 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
People don't often make rational decisions. In fact, the capacity for abstract rational thought is only a recent evolutionary addition to our brains. We've mainly gotten by on our emotions and gut feelings. We may think we're approaching something rationally, but most of the time we use after-the-fact rationalization to justify our intuitive and emotional decision making.

It's a well-known maxim in marketing that people who are comfortable enough with their current situation aren't good prospects for buying goods, services, or ideas -- they simply don't care enough to make a change.

All of the specific strategies and tactics that you'll apply to landing page optimization are aimed at influencing basic human emotions and moving your visitors off their comfortable spot. Direct marketers Bob Hacker and Axel Andersson have defined several key copywriting concepts that motivate people to act: fear, greed, guilt, exclusivity, anger, salvation, or flattery. Not one of these motivations is rational -- all of them are rooted in our fundamental and unchanging emotional nature.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635911

Selecting an SEO Firm: The What, How, and Who

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Website Marketing
on December 28, 2009 7:39 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Buying into SEO is a difficult process. Without at least a basic understanding of SEO, it's really tough to tell the difference between someone who knows their stuff and someone who talks a great game without backing it up with results.

Many companies looking for SEO help -- even those with a decent understanding of SEO -- try their best to shop around, but they always end up with two simple questions:

1. What is this firm going to do for me?

2. How much do they cost?

When you're hiring for a particular position in any business, you're looking at that individual's background. You aren't just hiring them based on how much they cost, or what they say that they will (or can) do. You're hiring them based on their resume, their references, and their history of performance.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635910

New Link Building Tactics 101, Part 2

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Website Marketing
on December 22, 2009 7:30 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
As you work toward a program of building links to your site, one important factor to consider is "who" will be doing the work.

According to Sage Lewis's "Re-Thinking Link Building" column, many businesses resort to letting their interns take care of link building. Others outsource the task. Clearly, people think this job is tedious and trivial.

Lewis correctly suggests dropping the term "link building" because it implies "quantity over quality." It's important to focus instead on the idea of reaching out to others and building quality connections that make sense.

Concentrate on offering something of value to the online community/industry to demonstrate why they should visit your site. Would you leave that job to an intern? Keep this in mind as you read these other link building ideas.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635922

Link Building Tactics 101, Part 1

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Website Marketing
on December 21, 2009 10:44 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Link building is widely considered one of the most important elements to obtaining high rankings in the major search engines. It also involves ongoing effort and a long-term strategy to ensure a Web site continues enjoying success in organic search results. This two-part article will explore several ideas on building quality links to your site.

Contextual Link Building

While the quantity of inbound links is important, the quality of those links is much more important. Links from sites that are topically or contextually related to your site carry much more weight than links from unrelated sites.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635920

What's the Future of Google's Local Search?

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Website Marketing
on December 18, 2009 8:16 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Google is making a powerful push to become the undeniable leader in providing local business information to online searchers. In the past year, Google has made the greatest concentration of changes and testing regarding Google Maps since it first made its appearance in 2004 as Google Local, and the rate of change has accelerated greatly over the past three months.

I have absolutely no inside information from Google Maps. This is simply speculation based on five years of watching and listening to what goes on at Maps. Here are the highlights:

In February 2009, Google began testing what has since been dubbed as the K Pack, where the maps that appeared next to the 10 pack in the Web results began showing additional markers -- not just those for the businesses listed in the 10 pack but also for other nearby businesses that didn't make it into that enviable position.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3635906

Viral Marketing Making It Manageable

By
Website Marketing
on December 17, 2009 10:01 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
At last week's SES Chicago, attendees were treated not just to a staggering amount of information on search engine marketing and optimization, but also other methods of digital marketing that are über relevant to today's media strategists. Included among them was viral marketing, and a session I moderated, "Igniting Viral Campaigns," addressed some misconceptions about this nebulous subject, while also illustrating that it's a lot more manageable than you might think.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3635901

Measuring SEO Results

By
Website Marketing
on December 16, 2009 8:05 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Defining your business goals is one of the most important things you can do at the start of any SEO project. For example, your goal might be to increase your non-branded search traffic by 25 percent.

Once you've defined your business goals, you can then think about the things that need to happen to meet those goals, and the nature of the SEO team required to meet them. Let's determine how to measure the results of your SEO efforts.

Ranking Reports?

Frequently, our clients tell us that they want to achieve a certain ranking for a specific search term. Many products that help you set up and monitor your rankings are available on the market. However, we prefer not to focus on this way of measuring results.

First, these types of programs scrape search engine results, and this is against the terms of service of the search engines. For this reason, it probably isn't a good idea to do that in any volume.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635889

The Demise of SEO Won't Be Caused by Personalization

By
Website Marketing
on December 14, 2009 9:40 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
A few people at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago this week, including some panelists on stage and many influential members of our industry, made it seem like personalization will mean the death of SEO. Aside from the obvious easy jabs from paid search extremists whose model would predict growth as a result of less emphasis on organic search, others seemed to lean a little too far toward fear mongering.

There were voices of reason as well. During the "Search Industry Today" panel, SES board member (and my friend) Anne Kennedy eloquently stated something I strongly agree with: "...(SEO) is evolving, not dead. What is dead is the rankings, yet over and over people talk about top 10 rankings."

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635872

How Will Mobile Search Impact Your Paid Campaigns?

By
Website Marketing
on December 11, 2009 7:19 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
You've heard a lot about the popularity of the iPhone, and the new release of Motorola's Droid. These phones, as well as many others on the market and even more to come, have changed the way that people use their phones and browse the Internet. Because the Internet experience on these phones is similar to the desktop, the user behavior is becoming similar, which includes search.

So people are searching more using phones, but what does that mean for your paid search campaigns? Beyond just continued growth of search volume, it means:

1. Mobile search queries are shorter in nature. Many reports state that the number of keywords in a user's search query is growing. While this may be true, on a mobile phone the user is much more likely to type a shorter query due to the keyboard and nature of the user.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635856

International Search Marketing Guide to the Holidays

By
Website Marketing
on December 10, 2009 7:42 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
When money is tight here in North America, people look for online deals, especially around the holidays. For those of you who run international search campaigns, you may be surprised that culture and buying behavior during the holidays is different in other countries. Not only do people shop online and use search engines differently, they also do things differently during the holidays.

Planning and succeeding with your international holiday search marketing strategy can seem daunting. There is opportunity, however, if you can time things right and present relative offers to this highly elusive global crowd.

See the full story at: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635851

Debunking Common SEO Myths

By
Website Marketing
on December 7, 2009 8:52 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
The process of SEO has changed, and quickly. Buying keyword-rich domains, writing a few articles and tweaking the titles will no longer net a top position on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

What is important to understand about search engine optimization (SEO) is that there is no constant -- no absolutes. But with a little education, there are myths that you can spot from a mile away and, more importantly, avoid wasting valuable time and resources.

The first and perhaps most damaging myth is that of guaranteed success. Keep this in mind when considering enlisting SEO help. SEO is a moving target and even some long-standing, "guaranteed" methods of SEO success have been proven ineffective.

See the full story at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2009/12/01/debunking-common-seo-myths.aspx

Site Redesign SEO Considerations for 2010

By
Website Marketing
on December 4, 2009 8:50 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Last year's holiday sales season wasn't so joyful for online retailers. But early reports indicate that things are looking up a bit this year. Initial Coremetrics data from Black Friday reveals that consumers spent 25 percent more this year, with orders totaling $170.19 on average -- an increase of about $44 over last year's average Black Friday order online.

Coremetrics also reported an 18 percent increase in the average number of items purchased per order this year on Black Friday. Last year, it was 4.56 items per order, but this year it increased to 5.40 items. The upturn of $3.80 per average order isn't exactly substantial, but online retailers will take any sales improvements to the bank. After all, they worked for it, and more importantly, they planned for it.

Launch and Relaunch Planning

If you have a Web site development or redevelopment project in your strategic plans for 2010, don't ignore SEO until after the site is launched or relaunched. Just as it takes a great deal of planning and coordination to produce successful holiday sales campaigns, it takes forethought and research to produce a search optimal Web site.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3635782

Market Your E-Biz: Build A Facebook Page

By
Website Marketing
on December 3, 2009 8:02 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
The social networking site Facebook is used by more than 150,000,000 million people to share personal information with friends online. With those kinds of numbers, you knew it would be belong until businesses saw the potential. If you're looking to tap the marketing potential of Facebook, you can create free Facebook Business pages -- leveraging Facebook business options can provide a new channel for you to interact with your customers.

At the same time these pages, called Public Profiles, can also help you acquire new customers as your Facebook fans spread the word about your business to their friends.

In this Facebook how-to guide we will walk through the steps to create your own Facebook Public Profile (also called a Fan page).

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/affiliate/article.php/3848666

35 social media KPIs to help measure engagement

By
Website Marketing
on December 1, 2009 7:36 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Social media measurement is something that I think should be undertaken with a sense of perspective, by standing back and looking at the big picture.

A widescreen approach to social media measurement ultimately looks at the things that really matter: sales, profits, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Besides, honing in on the detail might not be the best use of your time, given the obvious difficulties that arise, particularly with attribution.

But standing back and looking at the bigger picture is not going to be enough for your data-mad boss, is it? It's a bit too soft focus, right? He or she is going to want to see proof that all this social optimisation is actually working.

See the full story at: http://econsultancy.com/blog/4887-35-social-media-kpis-to-help-measure-engagement
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This page is an archive of entries from December 2009 listed from newest to oldest.

November 2009 is the previous archive.

January 2010 is the next archive.

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