Local Internet Marketing a Must

A common misconception among businesses that cater to a local consumer base is that there is no reason to market on the Internet or to have any kind of website at all. “Internet users buy on eBay and Amazon.com. Nobody uses the internet looking for local services,” they might think.

Let’s bust that myth right now. The truth of the matter is that millions of people search for local services every day! They use it to find the nearest restaurant, find recommendations for a local dentist, check the local computer store’s inventory and pricing, find the number for the town’s local plumber, find someone to take pictures of their kids, and pretty much anything else you can imagine.

The good news is that because there are so many people searching for local businesses on the Internet, local Internet marketing can be very effective. The bad news is that if you’re not taking advantage of it, your competition could be getting the business of all the local internet users that should be yours!

If there is a product or service that somebody offers, then there’s a good chance there is somebody searching the Internet for a local business to provide that product or service. For the ever increasing number of people who have grown up with the World Wide Web as an integral part of their lives, using the phone book to find information on local businesses is tantamount to communicating through snail mail instead of email, text messaging, or instant messenger.

But why would somebody search for a local computer store when they could just go to Dell.com?

Sometimes people want to be able to look at, play with, and see the actual product in person before forking over their hard-earned money for it. Sometimes it’s about immediate satisfaction. Consumers are an impatient crowd. When they want something, they don’t want it shipped 2nd day air, they want it right now! Maybe it’s a trust issue. There are still a percentage of people who don’t trust the internet to keep their credit card information safe.

Another reason is that you can’t try on clothing or shoes over the Internet. You can’t get your picture taken, try on makeup, or listen to the booming sound of the latest high-tech speaker system over the Internet.

And these days, local Internet marketing is a breeze! Services such as those provided by local Internet marketing experts like OrangeSoda have the technology and expertise needed to regionally target your Internet advertising so that only local internet searchers will see your ads. This not only prevents someone in another country from viewing your ad, wasting advertising dollars that you can’t get back, but it also means that you can target your ads to searchers in a particular state, county, or even a single city.

If you’re a local business targeting an exclusively local market, now is the time to get your name into cyberspace. Incredible opportunities are being missed by local marketers who are ignoring the vast power of local internet marketing. People in your town are searching right now for your services. Make sure you’re not missing out on the potential to get their business.

A good place to start is with a local business profile through OnlineInLocal.

Time to Prepare for the Q4 Holiday Rush

The Q4 holiday rush may seem like a ways off from here, but for savvy website owners, now is the time to start preparing for it. A lot of work goes into preparing for the last quarter push in sales, and with good reason. Consumers get in a mindset of spending money, and those who are prepared reap the highest benefits.

Q4 has a slew of holidays that gradually build up to “the big one”. While most Internet businesses tend to focus most of their resources on the last week of December, forgetting the other holidays can be a big mistake. Getting your site prepared for each holiday keeps people coming back for more ensuring that your last week of December is as big as it can possibly be.

The “HOT” Holidays

Fourth quarter holidays that should not be ignored include:

Other lesser known Q4 holidays (likely to only be observed by Google, who updates their homepage to reflect virtually every holiday, and very few others) include:

Also included are National Disability Employment Awareness Month (October) and National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 to Oct. 15).

Taking Advantage of Every Holiday

The fact that Google updates their homepage with a new theme to reflect virtually every holiday has created a lot of talk within the Internet community. Creating and updating your website with holiday themes can help create some chatter for your site as well.

Develop some thematic graphics that appear on your home page and throughout your site for each holiday, and run specials for these holidays to help drive sales. Here are a few ideas for specials you can run through each holiday:

For most folks, holidays are a way to remind them of something important. But for those of us in business, it’s an excuse to run a promotion that will boost our sales! Since consumers gravitate to promotions like bees to honey, you should never dismiss any chance to celebrate a holiday on your website.

Quick and Clean SEO - Part 2

In Part I of this article series, we discussed the SEO advantages of using keywords in your headlines. It’s one of the easiest and quickest methods to land a few extra points with the search engines. In Part II, we’ll reveal a couple more quick and easy methods of getting friendly with the search engines.

Bold or Italicize Keywords Throughout a Page

Bolding or italicizing keywords throughout a webpage will increase the relevance a search engine gives those specific keywords. The preferred method of bolding keywords is with STRONG tags, while italicizing should be done with EM (which is short for “emphasis”) tags:

Optimize for Less Popular Keywords and Phrases

Getting top ranking for the key phrase “hiking boots” can be tough because it’s a very popular term with a lot of competition. It can be done, but would require a lot of time and effort. And since this article is about speed and simplicity, we won’t discuss what would go into a campaign to get ranked for such a popular term.

For quicker and easier ranking, go after more specific, less competitive key phrases. For example, instead of “hiking boots” try combining the term with brand names, designs, material used, manufacturing process, and so forth:

You get the idea. While you won’t get as much traffic as a similar rank for a more popular phrase, you will get ranked much easier and faster. The traffic you get will also be more highly targeted and more likely to convert into a sale.

Keep the Code Clean

Search engines are interested in useful content on your webpages, not your sweet JavaScript or CSS skills. You can clean things up a bit by linking to script and CSS files from a separate location rather than including it in the same file as the rest of the webpage.

Clean code also makes it much easier for the search engines to scan your page and figure out what it’s all about.

The tactics that we’ve discussed in these articles can be very easily and quickly implemented into just about any website. Keep in mind, however, that you don’t want to get carried away by cramming a page full of keyword-stuffed headlines, bolding and italicizing half your page, or overusing a particular key phrase so much that nothing on your webpage makes sense.

Search engines are savvy enough to spot such meager attempts to get ranked, and most will penalize you for doing so. Also, don’t forget who you’re target market is… people. Stuffing a webpage full of keywords might help you get ranked higher (at least temporarily), but if a visitor can’t make sense of it, they’ll just leave your website anyway and your efforts will have been wasted.

So remember to keep it clean, keep it simple, and you’ll be happy with the results.

Quick and Clean SEO - Part 1

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a complex science, resulting in consultants that get away with charging thousands of dollars per month for just a few hours of consultation. The really good ones can charge tens of thousands per month and have no shortage of clients begging them for their help.

That some companies are willing to spend so much shows you just how important SEO is for an online business. A vital part of any internet marketer’s repertoire, properly managed SEO can get you listed at the top of every major search engine for the keywords of your choosing. For some keywords, being listed at the top can mean a difference of millions of dollars in revenue.

On the other hand, bad SEO can result in low rankings or even get you banned from the search engines. Getting blacklisted is enough to put some companies completely out of business.

Not everybody has the skills necessary to implement proper SEO. Good SEO means staying on top of things; getting to know industry insiders and constant vigilant testing of the search engines as you watch for changes in ranking algorithms.

Even for somebody that has the skills, running a business may take up all their time. So what is a busy business owner to do? The best solution is to hire somebody to do the work for you. While individual consultants charge a premium, you can often get similar results for a much lower cost from internet marketing firms such as OrangeSoda.

In the meantime, here are some quick, yet clean, SEO techniques that you can implement immediately to improve your search engine rankings.

Use Keywords in Headlines

Search engines figure that if something is in a headline, it must be important. Sub-headlines are also considered important, but to a lesser degree.

A headline is recognized as such with the following HTML headline tags:

Headline tags go all the way down to level six (H6) with H1 being the largest headline, and thus receiving the highest importance. If you want to optimize a page for the term “hiking boots”, then you should have that term between H1 tags.

If using a term in a sub-headline (H2, H3, and lower), then including those same keywords in a bulleted list immediately after will help give those keywords the same level of importance as keywords in a main (H1) headline.

In Part II of this article, we’ll discuss more easy SEO strategies.

What Can a Business Profile Do For Me?

You may have wondered, “What good is an online business profile going to do me?”

You might look at a business profile and see just a listing of your business name, contact information, and short description of the services you offer. Real simple, right? So why bother getting a business profile? Well, here are a few reasons:

And that’s just scratching the surface. Let’s look at a few of these points in greater detail, shall we?

It tells people who you are and what you do

A business profile is a useful tool to customers and other businesses alike. The media, customers, and other businesses all use business profiles to find and obtain contact information and confirm what it is that a particular company does.

It provides customers with an easy way to find you

The Internet is quickly replacing the yellow pages as the preferred method of finding information about local companies. Your profile page gives your customers a single webpage that they can bookmark and refer back to whenever they want to give you a call or refresh them on your location – either your physical location or website URL.

It creates a relevant inbound link to your website, improving its relevance with search engines

This is perhaps the #1 reason a business creates a profile. But as I’ve shown here, it’s far from the only good reason.

Furthermore, the additional exposure you receive as a result simply can’t be measured. Your profile could potentially be picked up by an investor looking to provide you with some extra capital, a potential business partner that could increase your revenues, or simply create a higher level of trust with potential customers.

Remember to keep all these things in mind when creating your business profile, and give it the same care you provide for your own website. Your profile is representing your company on the web. Put your best front on for it!

Link Building, Link Exchanges, and Ad Buys – What’s the Difference?

Part I: Link Exchanges

The word is out: having inbound links to your site is good. But what types of links are the best, and what is the difference between an ad buy, link exchange, and one-way link building?

Each linking method has its purpose. Which one you want to focus on depends largely on your end goal. Are you looking to simply get a quick increase in traffic, increase brand visibility, or improve your search engine rankings?

Link Exchanges

A link exchange is the practice of linking to another website in exchange for a link on that site to yours. For a time, this was a good way to increase your search engine rankings because search engines considered the number of links to your site as an important indicator of your site’s overall importance.

Webmasters would often create a links page where they would place their link exchange links, resulting many times in individual webpages containing hundreds, even thousands of links. The web also saw a propagation of “link farms” where a group of webpages all link to the other webpages within the group.

Link farms today are considered by most search engines to be a form of spam against search engine indexes. Spamming a search engine index in this manner often results in a site being penalized, lowering its search engine ranking or even getting black listed.

Link exchanges still have their place however. Two websites with complimentary services may agree to a link exchange where each site drives traffic to the other. When doing a link exchange, you always want to be wary that the number of outgoing links on any particular page does not get too high; otherwise a search engine may mistake your page for a link farm.

Link exchanges generally do not improve search engine ranking because search engines don’t consider a two-way link to be a good indicator of a site’s importance.

Part II: Ad Buys and Link Building

Ad Buys

An ad buy involves purchasing a link on a specific page, in a specific location. The advantage of this is that you have control over where and how your link appears. Placing links to your site from a website that a search engine considers to be important can give your site a boost in its search engine rankings.

Furthermore, having a link on a high-traffic site will result in referral traffic from that site.

Link Building

Link building is the process of placing one-way links to your site from other sites. Since search engines give a lot of weight to one-way links, this is a very effective method of increasing search engine rankings.

An understanding of link analysis is an important part of effective link building. Link analysis is what search engines do to determine the importance of a particular site in a particular category based on the links that point to it. The text contained around a link, as well as the text that is included as part of a link, are analyzed to determine this.

For example, the following text with a link will increase the target site’s importance for the keyphrase “green dog hair” slightly:

However, much more weight is given to a link that includes the keyphrase within the linking text:

The main purpose of link building is to create many one-way links with a specific keyphrase in the link, thereby increasing the target site’s search engine ranking. The more one-way inbound links there are, the more important a search engine will consider your site to be in a particular subject. If you have enough links, then the search engine will assume that you are an authority on the subject and rank your site accordingly.

Another part of link analysis, though to a much smaller extent than the number of links, is analyzing where the link is coming from. If a site that is considered to be an authority links to your site, then it is assumed that you have some authority on the matter as well. However, since there are usually so few sites that are considered to be authoritative, having a large number of inbound links is still considered far more important that the referring site’s authority.

The purpose of link building, then, is not to increase referral traffic from related websites (though this will usually happen as a side effect), but to increase your search engine ranking by showing them that you are an authority on a particular subject.

Managing Your Reputation Online: Part III – Controlling Your Name

A problem many companies run into with online reputation management are consumers that create their own websites to give bad reviews about their company, then begin to bid on their company name to show up in search engines under the sponsored results.

Some companies believe that there isn’t anything that can be done about this. After all, it’s a free country, right? Well, yes it is. However, freedom stops when it infringes on the freedoms of others. You have the freedom to protect how your name is used and prevent anybody from slandering you.

If somebody legitimately slanders you, then you have every right to ask that person to stop, and can even get a court order to enforce it or even file a lawsuit. Remember though that slander requires that false statements are being made. If a person is simply stating their opinion, then they are well within their rights.

However, if you trademark your company name it provides you with a little more protection and gives you a few more options. To start with, you can prevent anybody from bidding on your trademarked term in paid search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. If anybody tries, simply send them a cease and desist order. If it continues, then it’s time to call your lawyer.

The same holds true if anybody uses your name in a manner that isn’t covered under fair use laws. For example, comparative testing is an appropriate method of using a trademarked name. Truck commercials that compare horsepower, towing capacity, stopping distance, and so forth are considered comparative testing and therefore protected by fair use. Using a trademarked name for most other types of advertising would not be covered under fair use.

A trademark will not protect you from anybody starting a yourcompanynamesucks.com website. This has been challenged in court several times, and so far the law sides with the people who start the bad website. The best way to protect yourself from this kind of attack is to purchase the domain names yourself before an angry consumer is able to.
Be sure to purchase all variations (yourcompanysucks.com/net/org, yourcompany-sucks.com, etc.) Domain registrations are only a few dollars each these days, making it a worthwhile investment.

Watch for more tips on reputation management coming up next week!

The History of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Searching the Internet in the pre-World Wide Web days required downloading and installing programs which would then download and search directory listings from public FTP sites. It was all rather complex, and not for the non-geek. Which was fine since only geeks perused, or even knew of the existence of, the Internet in those days.

In the early 90’s, the World Wide Web was born and began to grow rapidly. Graphical Internet browsers were developed to make “surfing” the Web easy. But finding a webpage required that you knew its URL. Therefore, if you found a website you liked, having some method of keeping track of it was very helpful.

For this reason, browsers developed the bookmark, allowing you to save the location of a specific webpage, mapping the URL to a shortcut button within the browser. To revisit the webpage, you simply opened your bookmarks and clicked the appropriate shortcut link.

However, there still wasn’t any simple method of finding specific websites if you didn’t know the URL. In 1994, graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a website called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” in which they essentially published their bookmarks. Over time, it grew into a searchable directory.

Within a few months, the name was changed to “Yahoo!”. Yahoo! helped make the Internet more user friendly and updated search technology for the World Wide Web.

However, Yahoo! was just a directory. It wasn’t capable of searching anything that hadn’t been previously submitted to it. Also released in 1994 was what would become the first popular search engine as we understand them today. “WebCrawler” actively crawled the web, indexing websites automatically instead of waiting for somebody to manually submit them to a directory.

For the first time, Internet users could search a database containing virtually every website available on the World Wide Web. Internet users quickly realized the value of WebCrawler and it became one of the web’s most popular websites.

Copycats soon followed. Webmasters began to realize that getting listed in these new search engines was a way to get traffic with very little work. Thus was born a new science of marketing via search engines, or search engine marketing (SEM) as it is known today.

Early search engines were relatively simple, and easily manipulated. Search engine indexes quickly became overrun with websites utilizing “search engine spam.”
Internet users became increasingly frustrated with the search results being provided by search engines. Then in 2001, Google was discovered and quickly became the most popular search engine. The reason for Google’s popularity was its ability to provide highly relevant search results. Google had created a new way of indexing webpages that negated the spam tactics being used by many webmasters.

Although it wasn’t perfect, Google’s methodology was far better than what was currently available, and so many other search engines began to follow suit, changing their algorithms to provide more relevant results.

Google wasn’t infallible however, and webmasters quickly began discovering ways to trick Google as well.

This has resulted in a never-ending battle between search engines and webmasters. As the search engines change their algorithms, webmasters continually update their sites in attempts to gain or maintain search engine rankings.

Failing the ability to get ranked, webmasters found a new tool in 1998 called Goto.com. Goto.com was the first popular pay-per-click (PPC) service that allowed you get traffic by paying on a per-click basis. As PPC grew in popularity, paid ads began appearing on the popular search engines as “sponsored” results.

Internet marketing today has become a science, requiring highly educated and experienced Internet and search engine experts that continually monitor search traffic and keep up on the latest news. Companies desiring a strong Internet presence now have entire departments dedicated to Internet marketing. For smaller companies that don’t have the resources to fund an entire separate department for it, Internet marketing companies like OrangeSoda can provide those services at a much smaller cost.

Managing Your Reputation Online: Part II – Communities

In part one of this series, we covered review sites. Today, we’ll talk about managing your reputation among Internet communities such as discussion boards, blogs, and the like.
Businesses tend to get talked about in the public forum that is the Internet. The Internet, much like the real world, has developed many communities where individuals with similar interests can gather and swap stories and provide support for each other.

New communities are started every day, many when consumers rally around a common cause, be it for good or bad. Is your business creating communities? And if they are, is it for good or bad?

It’s bad when you’ve gotten yourself an angry customer that starts posting at places like Ripoff Report. It’s really bad when someone starts a “yourcompanysucks.com” website and people start heading to it in droves.

The “bad” communities (that is, bad for your company) are the ones you should be most worried about. These communities can very quickly destroy your reputation and even potentially be a major player in putting you under. And while you can’t put a complete stop to this kind of behavior, there are a couple of things that you can do to block a good chunk of it:

Defend Yourself

This is exactly what it sounds like. If people are going to go around trashing your good name in forums and other communities, then you ought to stick up for yourself when possible. Ripoff Report makes it easy, allowing you to post a rebuttal in your defense, giving readers a complete picture of the situation rather than the one sided (and often exaggerated) view of the angry customer.

To make sure you know when you’re being talked about, set up a Google Alert for your company name. This will tell you anytime new search engine results get indexed with your company name.

Now, the way to defend yourself is professionally. State the facts, and just the facts. Do not come out sounding defensive, nor should you attack the original poster in anyway. Both will make you appear more guilty, and result in a worsening of your reputation.

Here is an example of how NOT to respond to a customer complaint (note that the response is not directly from the company being complained about, but from an ex-employee):
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/260/RipOff0260796.htm#247501

Demeaning the complainant is the worst thing you can do. It shows a lack of any empathy for your customers, and future potential customers will judge you negatively for that.
Here’s an example of a good response:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/253/RipOff0253500.htm#240204

The facts, and just the facts, and what they are doing to correct the situation.

Make Your Customers Evangelists

What is an “evangelist”? It’s a customer of yours that is so happy with your company that they begin preaching your greatness to everybody they can. Most evangelists will even respond on your behalf to any negative posts on bulletin boards and consumer sites like Ripoff Report.

There are few things that look better to someone investigating your company than a past customer who is so passionate they are willing to defend your company to anyone who speaks ill of it.

Well-known entrepreneurial blogger Guy Kawasaki discuses how to get people to evangelize your product or service:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/guys_golden_tou.html

The gist of his post? Make a great product that is worth evangelizing about.

Giving Your Site an SEO Boost

Search engine optimization (SEO) is nearly as much an art as it is a science. The complexities of SEO require the services of experts in order to keep up. However, there are several things that can be done to give your website a quick SEO boost, and potentially improve your search engine rankings.

Two things that can be done relatively easily and quickly are creating content and increasing your link popularity. Both of these items are vital and very important parts of SEO. Doing just these two things virtually guarantees a boost in search engine rankings.

Creating Content

This is mostly done by writing articles that focus on the key phrases you are trying to optimize for. Trying to improve your ranking for the key phrase “hiking boots”? Start writing articles about them.

If you’re a retail store that sells hiking boots, then articles that review different brands of hiking boots, explain what to look for in a good hiking boot, a boot fitting guide, and so forth are perfect opportunities to boost your site’s relevance in the eyes of the search engines.

Some additional SEO tactics you can implement as you write these articles is linking out to authoritative sites (sites with a high Google Page Rank), increasing usability by linking to other related pages on your site, and making sure all your code is W3C compliant and that there are no broken links.

Be sure to include your chosen keywords and phrases in the webpage title, headline, and throughout the document. Bolding your keywords helps as well.

Increasing Link Popularity

Link popularity is a score based on the number of inbound links to your site. Though all inbound links count toward your link popularity score, certain types of links carry more weight than others.

One-way links carry the most importance, while two-way (you link to me and I’ll link to you) links are given relatively low importance. Additionally, any incoming links from a page the search engines consider to be a “link farm” (a page with a very high number of outgoing links) doesn’t help your cause much, and in fact can hurt your ranking.

Additionally, a one way link from a site considered to be an “authority” on a particular subject is given a bit more weight than a link from a less authoritative site. However, quantity of links is still more important than who they come from.

So how do you get people to link to you? Well, the best way is still to have great content that is worth linking to. If you have good content, other sites will naturally want to link to you without you even asking.

However, since you’ve written all those great articles (from following the advice in the previous section) offering redistribution rights on those articles is a great way to increase inbound links. The key is to require that anybody who reprints your article include all links that you’ve inserted, and always be sure to include a link back to your website in the article’s signature.