October 29th, 2009 by Bruce

The only time to even think about this question is if you would like your website to attract sales or interest from clients who do not know you and are searching for your goods or services over the internet. If your website is just an information service for existing customers then the answer is already a straight forward no, you require no Online Marketing.

If you do wish your website to work that way then you must establish if you need optimization, or if your site is good enough in that arena already. The best place to begin your research is with your competitors and their placing, in comparison to you, on the internet search engine results listing.

Choose your typical internet search engine, think about your industry and come up with a few quite specific words or phrases that describe loosely what products or services you offer. Then type these into the search engine one at a time and make a note of which of your competitors are usually listed on that first page of results. Also examine each page in turn until you locate your own website details ( if this does not appear after the first 10 pages of results you can stop searching!).

At this position you will be able to assess if your position is a lot lower that the competitors or not. If not, and you are listed up there on page 1 of the results then either you have a quite specific offering, practically no competitors or your site is already optimized to the precise level. Do double check at this point that you have not chosen a very specific keyword or phrase for your trial as this will twist results dramatically and give you a guarantee good Search Engine Placement!

If you have found your website way down the listings, or indeed you have not located your site at all in the first 10 pages then some online promotion in the form of search engine optimization may be worth doing.

There are professional firms out there who will help you to improve your positioning in the search results and this is critical for a decent amount of business. All the firms currently sitting on page one of the search results will attract the attention of at least 85% of the searching clients and provided that they do actually offer what their potential customer wants they will almost definitely get the business. The customer will certainly not be ploughing through page after page of search results when his product is right there on page one.

The Search Engine Optimization Company can ensure that your positioning improves over the course of a month or two and the benefits should then make themselves obvious.

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October 29th, 2009 by Bruce

We knew the day would come, even though it arrived with little fanfare, when Twitter would succumb to the advances of Google and Bing or even fall to some real-world pressures to monetize its Online Business. In other announcements, the two primary search engines talked about an agreement with the micro-blogging supergiant, which allows the search engines to reproduce information reflecting real-time “tweets” which are related to specific keyword searches.

In the case of Bing, scoring a touchdown in its much proclaimed war against King Google, its interface went live immediately. Directly accessible through its very own page rather than on the search engine home page, Bing’s interface also provides a list of tweets which match the keywords specified, in some situations underneath the webpage the tweets actually refer to. They also have a very prominent Twitter trends cloud to show you what people think is hot and what’s not.

Google, meanwhile, merely stated on its company blog that it would be including Twitter returns with search engine results in due course and the posting may well have been just a hasty reaction to the emerging news from Microsoft.

For Internet marketers, these announcements may help to make more sense of the Twitter phenomenon and open up opportunities for those who are fleet of foot and can imagine opportunities and scenarios. By being aware of hot topics and how they could affect your operation or by creating twists that could be applied to generate some publicity, you could instantly post some optimized tweets and appear on the first page of Bing’s Twitter engine results.

Twitter has its own search feature of course but it is not widely used. Unlike their own feature the results displayed on the Bing page display the extended URLs and domain names of referenced pages and not the bit links we are used to seeing within Twitter-dom.

It will be interesting to experiment with these new features and to really unravel the repercussions of what are sure to be significant developments in the world of online business and marketing. We need more than 140 characters to understand the full implications!

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a cutting edge Executive Virtual Assistant Service which assists organisations and enterprising individuals with every detail of their entrepreneurial aspirations. Do you want to peruse some further information on these incredible online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Now!

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October 26th, 2009 by Bruce

Companies who see that their website is not appearing on the first page after a Google search may well start to look for a SEO Company to help them realise search engine placement on page 1. This is critical for those companies who trade largely on the internet, such as Online Marketing companies, as their search engine positioning on page 1 could be the difference between great sales and porr, even average sales.

More care should be taken than just a search for such companies and then looking at the price of their services, as there may be companies who are not as ethical as others. They may make excessive claims, such as to guarantee to get the client to Search Engine Placement at No.1. Given the competition for top ranking, especially for some clients in a huge marketing area, just getting anywhere on the first page is a great success.

The client needs to be sure that the search engine optimisation company is decent, which could be done by asking them for a list of their customers and then contacting the clients to get their ideas. This would also give some idea of how long they have been operating and how successful they are, however in the real world there could well be a new company that is attempting to break into the SEO market and is very ethical in its practices.

One way of checking how good a SEO company is would be to do a web search to establish where their web site comes in the organic results segment, i.e. the results below those that are sponsored. If it isn’t on page 1 then are they going to do a decent job on the client’s web site?

How long a client web site has been on page 1 will tell you if the Search Engine Optimization Company is using ethical or White Hat techniques to optimise the site content. If the client reports that they were on page 1 but now are way down the results or not showing at all, then this means that the Search Engine Optimization Company has been using unethical or Black Hat processes. These are recognised by the search engines and can lead to the web site being removed from the search index, which means that it will not be shown in search results at all.

White Hat processes offer a long lasting place near the top of the organic results and only severe competition from other clients in the same market place should affect that position, apart from short term Black Hat optimised sites of course.

In short the best way of locating a decent Search Engine Optimization Company is by referral and asking people who are customers or such organisations.

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October 26th, 2009 by Bruce

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should at all times be conducted in an ethical way so that the Search Engine Placement of the client website will be on the initial page of a list of organic search engine results. These results will in general come after a list of sponsored sites that are pertinent to the search keyword(s) typed in.

The procedure by which a search engine, e.g. Google, sorts out which web sites are relevant to the keyword(s) submitted for search, is by having previously indexed the pages and stored the results in a database. Thus by looking through the index for the keyword(s) a fast response is assured, usually in less than a second.
The search engines use a program to do the indexing, known as a robot or spider, and these robots have been built and refined to identify unethical practices that they find on web pages, which they might well then exclude from the database. In some cases the web site may be excluded in it’s entirety.

The robot grades the web pages by several methods: The number of times a keyword is found on a page, and the number of times independent sites link to the page.

For clients operating Online Marketing services, it is important that their web sites have longevity as they may well sustain many other clients.

Keywords:
Unethical Practice:
Keyword Stuffing is an unethical exercise of repeating a keyword many times in a web page, in general by using text that is the same colour as the backdrop so that it won’t be viewed by a visitor but will be seen by the robot.
This can also be used for keywords in Meta tags in the html head of the web page code.
Ethical Practice:
Ethical exercises focus on what the user experience will be, so the page text should be significant to the page title and the page title should mirror the link that was used to reach it, as well as the actual content. Content should be cautiously written in good English with no spelling or grammatical errors, and should emphasise the product or service that the page is about. Keywords should be part of the typical flow of text and repeated only as often as sensible reading allows. For keywords in Meta tags a exclusive list of keywords should be used.

Links to the page:
Unethical Practice:
An unethical developer may create what are known as Doorway Pages, where the text is probably just keyword stuffing and a link to the promoted web site.
Ethical Practice:
The ethical method is to create significant pages that can be read by a user and have links to the client site.

If looking for a SEO Company, ascertain which methods they use before committing yourself to their services.

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October 24th, 2009 by Bruce

If you have invested in an online marketing service from a SEO Company you will have with a bit of luck been through a useful process of business and customer assessment. Ideally what should happen is that the optimization company spends time with you recognising and then valuing keywords, then decides how those keywords should be woven into your existing website. Next the process of making certain the correct coding is shown to the search engines is done, and finally the off page promotion of your site. At this stage you should start to see your website progressively improve in it’s Search Engine Placement positioning. It may take some time for the site to arrive at page one of the search engine page listings but in the end, possibly after a month or two, this should occur.

Once it is, sales will not usually increase at once, unless you have a commodity based product. However over the coming weeks visitors numbers to your site will increase seriously. Searchers become farmiliar with seeing you on that first page, book marking you for future reference and sending your link on to colleagues or friends. It is then that the sales or enquiries should start to grow, and it could be anything from one to six months after the success of your search engine placement depending on what type of purchase you are asking clients to make.

With any luck discussions about how quickly the benefits of the online marketing drive would be seen were part of the service received from the Search Engine Optimisation Company. If this was not the case or if these timescales look as if increasing even after getting page one ranking it could be time to evaluate the way you website is working. Re-visit the keywords identified to make sure that you are targeting the precise customers and re-check competitor sites to see if you have been left behind in any area. Online Marketing is a continuous process, if the page one listing is not delivering extra business in to you in the predicted time frame it may be that the service has been below standard; your industry has transformed in the time taken for the campaign to achieve it’s goal; or just that the design of the website is not helpful to bringing that custom in.

It may be the error of the Search Engine Optimisation Company or it may be down to other circumstances either way the best course of action in this situation is to get back in touch with your contact and ask for a detailed explanation.

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