SEO Tips Optimization After Panda

October 13th, 2012

There are people who have  said that effective use of SEO, or search engine optimization is dead in 2012. But it has been proven countless times to produce the highest quality of traffic to a website. Whilst there are some standard regimental practices to follow such as having a good title tag, at least one H1 tag, quality content that includes your keywords and anchor text with ALT TAG variance.

The bottom line is if you do not have visitors or traffic, to your site – then whether you are managing a brochure or ecommerce site if it does not have the content that sells and asks for the money, then you are going nowhere.

All  business owners must release themself from the myth – create a site – build it, and they will come.

When it comes to doing optimization, more commonly known as SEO there are still some tested and verifiable SEO tips you can use that is best practice.

Number one is writing good quality natural content and that should include linking anchor text, which is recommended you use where applicable. Anchor text is text that appears in your content that is then linked to another page either inside your website or to another site with relevance. Links from other websites are also referred to as ‘backlinks’.

Be sure to do deep linking with your backlinks using the relevant keyword phrase for the page you are looking to link too.

An an example of putting an Anchor Text Link in your content. So, you have a a keyword such as “web design,” so when you’re getting backlinks you want that link to have an ALT TAG piece of anchor text against it that compliments that word, for example: ‘web developers in Scotland’.

Since Google rolled out the Penguin Algorithm – Click Here – is back, but the ALT TAG you might apply to this could be Search Engine Marketing Expert, should the page you are on be talking about Search Marketing.

The bottom line is always use relevant keyword phrases in all your anchor text.

If there are one or two keywords in your copy you feel are really important then you can still do the occasional bolding up of that word or phrase. Bullet points, put those in italics.

Search engine algorithms will add some degree may add some weight to your keywords when you do that.

One sure way to do SEO properly is to consider using an affordable SEO TOOL such as LINKDEX. This tool will help you ‘tune’ your pages and help you implement best practice SEO.

One H1 tag on your page, some good quality content, the use of an H2 tag where applicable and be sure to use your primary/secondary keywords ‘for that page’ is really important. They’ll become more valuable and relevant for the search engines when it comes to conducting best practice optimization for your website pages.

So the end goal is having each page on your site optimized for a particular primary keyword or phrase and also for a few secondary keywords that are topically related.

Optimizing your site means regular updates to your site with new content and if a page does become totally redundant, be careful how you dispose of it.

Search engines are looking for the most relevant information and consistent updates and are much better today in finding new content quickly and coming back to a site if it thinks the pages there have something to offer, is fresh and seen as a popular magnet.

So when consistently adding new and useful information to your site, it gives a reason for visitors to return and believe that your site is worthy. With each update, search engines will see your site as more of an authority and a reliable source.

It is important to note that search engine optimization will not happen overnight. It takes time to get lasting results and for your pages to mature. So doing SEO is worth the effort. Your pages will always fluctuate as could your PageRank or Quality Score if you are using Adwords.

Google Panda wants you to create good quality content today, back this up by working on perfecting your title tags, on the page headlines and that body content, and this should get you the attention you desire from the search engines.

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3 Profitable Video Marketing Techniques For Internet Marketers

October 13th, 2012

Marketing your products and services using video can generate impact from the target market audience you are trying to attract.

This is just marketing using advertising concepts and best practice when using video. There are optimizing dos and don’ts you will have to consider when it comes to video.

The success of your marketing campaign will hang on how well you do your market research, competitor research and perform effective optimization of your video.

So, there are at least three effective video optimization tips we want to tell you about here.

1) Use a video to get your viewers familiar with your company, the product, the benefit of that product or service and how to ask for the money.

Video engages viewers, so you have the opportunity to enhance your brand value, create loyalty and acquire your audience to follow you and keep coming back into your target niche.

Having a video on You Tube doesn’t mean you have to be a large company or have a huge filming budget to create your own brand on film.

You won’t have trouble promoting your business if your videos have all the righ qualities.

Next is getting your videos seen and viewed, it is all about maximum exposure. YouTube is the number one video sharing site, but there are many other sites that have a high amount of traffic for video marketing.

All of this will take time, even just uploading videos can take a lot of time, and that is why so many people love using distribution websites.

You will also get more use and mileage out of video marketing by using your marketing video in other areas of your marketing strategy such as landing pages.

Video Marketing Guru Greg Jarboe has proved on many occasions how video can become an important aspect of SEO with Google and in a very short space of time.  Videos on your website have been known to help with search marketing and ranking. Placing videos on your sites will help make the website more sticky and bring visitors back.

The above are just 3 tips from a book written by Greg Jarboe You Tube Video Marketing an Hour A Day that will help you understand the value of video marketing and how to optimize your video and do it right.

Think of this book as one of a number of ‘bibles’ you need to surround yourself with as the best practice information needed to succeed in online marketing. It is not so much saying internet marketing is easy to do, it is more about following best practice, as the potential is enormous. Planning and recording the video is vital but once ready to market you will need to work on getting your videos seen by as many people as you can. Vdeo marketing like every other marketing technique will require you to put in a bit of effort to get targeted results.

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Cheap Website Designers or Expensive Web Design Agencies – Who Do You Choose?

September 25th, 2012

How to Choose a Web Designer

Just over 1 year ago this website wrote a blog about choosing someone to design a website and talking about those website designers claiming to be the best.

We searched around back then during which we came upon a link to a YouTube video from a website agency that claimed to be the best and having the most success in building ecommerce websites. Admittedly the platform used, a combination of Joomla and Virtumart demonstrated it had reasonable capability to act as a flexible solution providing sufficient features to assist with online marketing.

However, we are now 1 year down the line and since then new words came into the world of Internet Marketing – PANDA and PENGUIN.

Now, talk to the average small medium business owner keen to see his company supported by either a brochure or ecommerce website and throw in words such as Panda and Penguin during a consultancy session, and many business owners will think you previously worked in a Zoo, as they have no idea how search engines work, and they are not really bothered. Simply because they put all their faith in the web developer they will engage with thinking that person is a professional and will keep me right and look after me.

Many large companies that operate a website have invested towards putting in place what is referred to as a website manager. This person has to come into your business with a variety of skills in order to handle the day to day managing of a website. And without doubt in today’s online marketing environment you have to dedicate time and effort to your website if it is to win races and bring to your business, traffic, sales and profits.

Many small companies on the other hand do not have the resource or the funding to justify a full time position to someone that will look after their website. Yet, these small business owners have the same expectations and goals as large companies and want to achieve the same goals just like the big brand businesses.

So, why do we have so many businesses who decide to have an online presence fail within the first year of having a website?

The answer to this lays both with the business owner and the website designer or web agency a company MD engages with. More importantly businesses do not take enough time at the beginning of a project to plan out what they actually need the website to do.

Many business owners don’t make sufficient time to put aside in order to learn what type of website is needed by their business and how it should be built.

In the eyes of most company owners and especially in the small business community you will find they turn to someone they know who is ‘Into Computers’ – Yes this person will do them a favour and build them a website.

So, we find when a company comes to us Internet Marketing Practitioners after having had a website for year to tell us it is not working and what can we do for them, we are then told the story of who actually built the website.

In some cases it is a web designer working from home, in other cases it is this ‘person who is into computers’ that probably works as a gas engineer or telephone repairman’ who happens to do his job using a computer and has offered their services as a side line to make some extra money.

As money is tight all around right now, the business owner needing a website thinks – great – I can get a cheap website and be online with it next week.

Our gas engineer or telephone repairman says, “yeh its easy I just go to some website get a template or two and throw this thing together and there is your new website”. The only thing is, it doesn’t work.

If you are reading this and think you are in this type of scenario right now where you are either considering “ I need a website” to support my business, or you are thinking “I have a website and it doesn’t work” and brought very few visitors or sales then get contact us and we can tell you about people this website can signpost you too.

You might want to talk to ICTADVISOR LTD who are eager to support the small business community and ensure business owners don’t waste their valuable budget when deciding on having a website. Or you can make contact with an organisation such as Sitelogic Marketing who support some really large brand names across the World. And, to ensure your website meets with best practice design standards, why not visit the OnlineXcellence website, where you will find the people behind both ICTADVISOR LTD and Sitelogic Marketing along with a few others all willing to help both large and small companies achieve reaching their goals online.

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Businesses tired of website design companies who fail them

July 29th, 2011

Website Designers claiming to be the best – but are they?

Your business is faced with a tough task when trying to choose the right website agency.

What sort of vehicle do you want your website pages to drive around in, so that they can be found?

Do you as the business owner needing a website have a pretty good idea as to what you are looking for.

Maybe, you have seen this ideal vehicle we speak of here, that is already out there on the road which is your competitor.

But, where can you test drive the website vehicle that is called a Content Management Software CMS solution to house your next website?

Where is the place you can not only read the literature about new CMS models?
Is there anything in the website literature that gives you an indication of the how good your website platform will be when expected to give you the miles to the gallon you will want to get from your website vehicle?

Here is a video that could help you choose the perfect website platform

What would be interesting is a place you can come to where there are sufficient testimonials written about the website vehicle you may considering purchasing.

Will you website CMS platform come with any guarantees.

Choosing a website can be a minefield. Yes, there are websites that will give you an overview of the CMS and that does give some help in your decision making, but where the danger is are the people out there claiming to deliver successful websites using these available solutions whereby the ‘website designer’ is pulling together all the parts. Building websites is one thing, building a website that will achieve its marketing objectives is often overlooked.

The website design and website marketing industry is unregulated and it is therefore difficult for the business owner to know what guarantee he or she has from the choice they make when choosing someone to build their website.

And considering business owners could spend anything from £3k to £30k on a website project , then, how do you know what you are being sold is a fit for purpose website. How will you know?

This is the reason for an an initiative in Scotland called OnlineXcellence
Marketing expert associated with this initiative are leading edge practitioners with at least some pedigree behind those you can get access too.

Marketing experts that will help businesses on their planned journey towards putting in place a website that has to bring revenue into the business.

The journey starts by helping the MD plan for the investment needed to put in place a website.

A key step in the initial stages is to look at whether the MD’s plan to have an online presence is actually viable.

The assistance provided also helps the MD choose a website design team, and hand hold them during the design stages of the website to ensure the chosen web agency is implementing a website design that is fit for purpose to support your marketing strategy.

This marketing support service even helps the business train a member of staff to become the company’s ‘Website Author’.

Altogether, experts from OnlineXcellence assist and help the business owner research and then plan to prepare a specification to brief either their incumbent web developers or choose a new web design team. Once the website is in build, the OnlineXcellence marketing expert will oversee the acceptance of key pages, and then after the site launch help the business owner and their staff market the website.

The OnlineXcellence marketing expert is on the side of the business owner every step of the way to ensure they get what is required to support their online objectives and not what the web agency thinks it should provide.

If you are trying to plan your website development and don’t know where to turn to have someone design your website, or market it, we recommend you acquire the assistance of the OnlineXcellence team.

The OnlineXcellence marketing expert will help your business measure the professional capability of the website design company, questioning and probing whether they can demonstrate their capability to build your website, whether they fully understand Internet Marketing to ensure that what they build is fit for purpose.

CONTACT US TO FIND OUT MORE 

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Strategic Marketing Tools to help Small Businesses

March 5th, 2011

There are many keyword research tools to choose from and for small business owners, it can be difficult knowing which tools to consider using on  a regular basis.

The team hear at IBMC have the opportunity to try out a number of different marketing tools to assist us in working with our clients.

These have included products such as
Wordtracker
Keyword Elite
NicheBot
Google AdWords
Good Keywords and many others.

Many small business owners will no doubt have already possibly been guided towards some of these tools through the marketing efforts of those company’s who built and promote them via a number of channels.

So, which of the above tools gets our vote, or is there a tool that stands out above all the others that gets our vote? The answer is NO.

If like us you are doing keyword research every week if not everyday you will end up getting a variety of results using a combination of these tools since each of them bring different results to help us achieve our objectives.

But, we thought we would give a mention today too two more tools:
Market Samurai
Linkdex

Market Sumurai is more than just a keyword tool that we first got introduced too when it was still a beta program. It is packed with a number of features that helps us deliver detailed strategic analysis to our client base.

The enriched features built into the Market Samurai tool are:

  • keyword analysis
  • competitor ranking analysis
  • competitive adwords data
  •  monetization
  •  find subject matter content

There is much more, but these are just some of our favourites.

Linkdex is another tool we have really become excited about as it comes with a lot of important features that internet marketing website analysts like us have been crying out for. This is a tool that is suitable for both small and large businesses. It has a great feature of being able to plan your tasks and monitor what effect that task once in place is having on your key landing pages. And, when it comes to doing competitor analysis especially in the field of link building, we can think of no other tool that is so powerful in helping with what is a vital task in your marketing strategy.

The main features of the Linkdex tool are:

  • Web Author Task Manager
  • Keyword Research
  • Rank Tracking
  • Site Optimisation
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Link Building

To do internet marketing properly you have to learn how to tools such as Linkdex or Market Samurai, and this does take time as you need to know them inside out.

But lets make one thing clear, you have to decide early on whether you want to really learn how to make use of the tools yourself and do all the analysis that will help improve your website, or if there is no time in your working day to commit to these important task get someone sufficiently knowledgeable to do operate the tool for you.

We find that depending on the size of the small medium business, some owners will take the time required to learn the tool. Others have put in place an in-house web author who then comes under our guidance for a while until that person is fully up to speed in making efficient use of all the tools features.

What has become more encouraging is finding those companies we do work with using these tools are becoming more interested in the results produced which improves their competitiveness and supports the strategic marketing plan we have helped them to create in order to be one step ahead of their competitors.

If this is you, then consider working with IBMC, the Internet Business Marketing Company as your strategic marketing partners that help businesses do more than just search marketing, but deliver a complete online growth solution to your business.

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How to Drive Quality Traffic from Your Digg

March 5th, 2011

Digg is a social media portal on which people submit content that is then voted on by the community as being good or bad. As a story on Digg gets more votes, it becomes more popular. In the following article we shall be discussing three unique tips to help you drive targeted traffic to your site or blog using Digg. You can use Digg to promote new product launches and and draw attention to your latest  Video Marketing campaign

Understanding how Digg works is the best way to get traffic from it. If you don’t understand social voting or how it works on Digg, you won’t send a lot of traffic from it to your site. When you’re getting started on Digg, you need to spend some time submitting general web content that you find as you surf. This will show you just which kind of content gets the highest levels of attention and how you can use that knowledge to promote your own site.

Once you have gotten to know Digg well and understand what makes it go, you will feel much better about entering your own content into the network and helping it get to the first page.

Remember, Digg is after all a social community, which means you’ll have to impress the users if you want them to Digg your content.

Try to become a top user at Digg. This is just one tip that can help you out quite a bit because the top users of Digg have lots of power. Regularity is important: be consistent when you submit high quality content to the system. If you let yourself just be another Digg user, you won’t really get a lot out of the site.

Your aim should be to grow your presence on Digg, so that it becomes easier for you to have your submitted content hit the front page again and again.

Last but not the least; don’t just submit your content to Digg and expect to get all the Diggs. You also need to go beyond and put in some external effort too. Putting the Digg button on your site where you post your original content is an example of this. This encourages regular visitors to your sites to Digg your content which can help your reach considerably. Remember: the more people who Digg your stuff, the higher it will rise in the program’s rankings and the more likely it will be to get to the front page. So take help from your existing visitors to grow your Diggs. All in all, as long as you continue to create quality content, you can get a bunch of exposure from Digg–after all, the system isn’t going anywhere. The real way to get big on Digg is to create content that is so worthy of attention that nobody can ignore it. Try to be unique in your approach and give the other Digg users something that they would be interested in.

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Writing Efficient Posts for Facebook.

March 5th, 2011

Facebook continues being a popular platform for social networking and also a hub for online marketers who have been taking full advantage of LIKE pages. One of the major considerations for success with facebook pages is your postings, they need to be worthwhile. Here we will discuss ways for you to create worthwhile posts that will help you get more out of them.

1. Be authentic in your approach and actually make people who visit your page feel what you’re writing. Whatever submitted posts you make, make sure that they are honest and transparent so that your audience fell they are able to  connect with you. Your posts have to not only look genuine but also have to be genuine. If you want your business pages to do well in Facebook, don’t forget that people buy things from others that they feel a connection with.

You have to inject your personality into the posts you create because this will give you an edge over the competition. Visitors to your pages are real people and they have feelings.

If they acknowledge anything that you say, it will be based upon what they feel.

You might want to try and avoid directing your posts to a whole group and instead respond to a single person at a time directly.

Try and address with that visitor to your page on a 1-2-1 basis even though you are really communicating with all of the people who are engaged in the post. The reason for this is because they are not reading it as a group but by themselves as individuals. Your personal touch will invoke a better response.

3. Try and make your posts positive and colorful. You should never express anything that makes people visiting feel bad.

Have your visitors reply to your offers in a good manner. If you’re going post anything negative, it will surely make everyone uncomfortable, not a good thing keeping in mind that these people may do business with you.

Your aim is to get people who visit your facebook pages involved in a good way. All in all, always make the mood as relaxed as possible when creating Facebook posts.

Tips on crafting posts the right way on facebook

There are many times you notice that facebook pages make the mistake of not utilizing their updates correctly, which means in the long run they’ll end up losing a good number of visitors from their page. In conclusion, if you want to reap the real benefits of running a personal or business page in facebook and actually driving targeted traffic to your site then start applying the tips discussed here.

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Which Should You Focus Your Efforts On SEO Or Content

March 5th, 2011

When it comes to writing for websites, many people tend to get the balance wrong between their SEO efforts and their written content. This is all complicated by the fact that there are a lot of differing opinions – experts will give conflicting advice on which is more important between content and SEO. If you need help deciding how to balance your SEO efforts and your content then the following ideas should be of some use for you:

1. Focusing on quality content is probably what you should do if you don’t have a lot of time to spend on your website. Well written articles already have elements in them that will work for SEO. Poor quality content will always be a big turn off no matter how much of an effort you put into SEO.

2. It is a good idea to try and determine where your SEO efforts are working and where they are not. If you are concentrating a lot on a certain part of SEO such as social media to build up your numbers but this doesn’t seem to be working then it could be time to go back to the drawing board. SEO tools will work well for one person but may not necessarily work the same for another person.

3. You may want to get your SEO taken care of by a professional company if you can afford to pay for this service. Then you can spend your time focusing on creating quality content for your website.

4. There are some simple SEO tasks that can be done every time you post so make a list of these. If you are organised it is possible to have your cake and eat it too.

 5. Spending a lot of time on your SEO efforts is something you should really do if you have plenty of time on your hands this is the best way to make sure your website performs to its fullest potential.

SEO firms can certainly help you with your website by offering skilled assistance.

But remember, SEO is only part of the equation as their are many other aspects to consider when trying to get visitors to come to your website.

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The Worst Mistakes You Can Make With Twitter Marketing

March 3rd, 2011

Twitter marketing is still in the news and continues to be a popular social media channel around the world.

But it is amazing there are many people who still don’t really know how to use twitter properly. Our Twitter expert Toni@OnlineXcellence tells you here about some of the blunders people make that can stop you from progressing towards getting more followers and followings.

It’s essential that you are clear about who your targeted prospects are when you market on Twitter. If you target your followers in a particular niche and then send them tweets on other topics, you will have a hard time holding their interest.

If people follow you to get information on a certain topic, don’t make the mistake of sending out too many tweets on unrelated subjects. Many marketers feel they have to tweet on many subjects in order to have their followers relate to them, a concern which has some validity.

Yet you should still keep most of your tweets relevant or you can lose your focus. It will be difficult for you to market products in your niche if too many of your tweets are on unrelated subjects. It’s fine if you occasionally tweet on other, random topics to entertain your followers.

You should keep most of your tweets relevant to your own niche, though. This means that if you’ve decided to tweet about getting married, then that’s what you should be talking about most of the time. If you start to tweet about every other random thing you like, you’ll lose focus and also your followers.

Keep in mind that Twitter users want to have enjoyable conversations, not read dull and uninteresting tweets. You can take advantage of this as a Twitter marketing person. Try to be fun to be around (like Toni) and tweet random things to your followers that they would find interesting. You don’t want to get stuck only talking about one subject all the time. You won’t keep your followers for long this way. Your followers can leave you just as fast as they signed up, so you don’t want to be dull. Make your tweets valuable as well as interesting, so search for useful items you can tweet about. Doing this will eventually help you to expand your online business, as your reputation gradually increases. It’s possible to be an effective marketer on Twitter while keeping your touch light and friendly.

Avoid making the mistake of using improper language on Twitter when you’re building a relationship with your followers. Cussing and using other language that offends will give you horrible results. Keep in mind that it’s all about appearing professional and conveying an image that you’re someone they can do business with. If you are constantly using language that offends people, you will likely find people not wanting to do business with you.

In general, there are many potential ways you can leverage the power of Twitter marketing. But the only way you can make the most out of it is by doing your homework and keeping away from common mistakes.

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