Your job, as the copywriter, is to entice them into each segment so they will consume as much of your copy as possible. Take your cue from Reader's Digest. They crank out — issue after issue — exceptional opening lines for their articles that engage then hook readers. What happens next? The reader is pulled into the story full force....
As online marketers we are trying to help our clients gain a presence within the search engine results. A recent Comscore Report suggests that in the US, Google happens to have the largest search engine market share with over 44%. So it stands to reason that we should concentrate the majority of our efforts on Google....
When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site's profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results....
Quality inbound links are indeed an extremely important element of any promotion and when many are obtained I am certain they are a significant cause for rankings....
When visitors arrive on your website, what are they doing? Is it what you want or expect them to do; or are they aimlessly wandering around and not finding what they came in looking? Are your potential customers abandoning your site just seconds after their arrival? If you are puzzled because you don't know what visitors are doing, or why, then how can you ever create a decent strategy to offer your visitors a better experience on your website?...
This year, with the cost of Pay Per Click (PPC) keyword advertising prices up and dwindling search inventory, experts are predicting an increase in SEO campaigns. But, as always, buyer beware. Due diligence is wise when planning any marketing campaign. When you plan your search engine optimization campaign, there are a few pitfalls you must avoid....
The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to put products or services in front of as many interested eyeballs as possible. Where the public leads, marketers, by necessity, must follow and if those eyeballs begin to congregate over there as well as over here, many marketers feel the need to move. Online marketers looking for another winning venue are therefore turning to social media spaces as social marketing tools....
It's difficult to gain a decent trust factor in competitive areas, so you'll want to think of everything you can to set your site apart from the others in your niche. The more useful stuff you can offer that isn't offered by others, the better your chances will be for search engine success....
With all of this talk about content, don't you think it's time to have a frank discussion about grammar? Our Web sites are our online store fronts -- our online images. If our sites are full of grammar errors, what does that say about the professionalism of our businesses?...
Over the last several months, I’ve read multiple threads that noted the explosion in the number of SEO job listings. In these postings, people speculated whether this meant Corporate America was finally recognizing that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has become an essential core competency that needed to be brought “in-house”....
Article in Washington Post about an Iowa woman's claim that she spends hours daily clicking Google AdWords Ads. The article describes how Jackie Parks, a disabled stay-at-home mom in Iowa spends hours each day clicking Google AdWords ads for- 1/2 a penny(!) a click each day. She makes 300.00 a year doing this....
More often than not, keeping things simple can often yield better results than you may originally expect. This Keep It Simple Stupid acronym applies to search engine marketing as well. For website owners that are just starting out, keeping your online strategies simple may be just what the doctor ordered....
Last week, I gathered in New York with 12 other search marketers for SEMPO’s bi-annual planning retreat. Observations included the current build or buy search marketing capabilities dilemma faced by the big agencies, the red hot demand for anyone with search marketing experience, the sudden development of search marketing in house groups in large organizations and the current push for industry wide certification of SEM practitioners....
SearchMash is a fun, ad-free search environment. I could see many of these features making their way into Google search at some point in the future....
The average search engine optimization company is in high demand, and with rising pay-per-click costs and growing exposure of SEO in the mainstream media, this is unlikely to soon subside. Unfortunately, many organizations that willingly embrace SEO as a marketing tool also unknowingly sabotage the efforts of the search engine optimization company they have chosen....
For years SEO has been relatively easy to jump into and "expert" SEO firms were known to appear overnight, only to disappear months later. That said, fly-by-night SEO "gurus" are not the only reason that many businesses have soured on SEO....
Blogs have been around a while but in my opinion, they were made popular by the breaking stories that were released faster than the largest news agencies. This article focuses on the various ways that a blog can be used to promote your business and the benefits of each....
Today’s search engines are amazingly apt at uncovering the depth of information buried within the billions of pages that encompass the web. Yet, despite their prowess, today’s search engines still produce irrelevant search results for many queries....
The term, "sandbox" describes a process of Google's ranking formulas that appear to slow the debut of new sites in the Top10 listings. Whether or not the sandbox exists tends to depend on the side of the black hat / white hat debate one comes from. SEOs dedicated to "pure", non-spammy SEO tend to downplay the effects of the sandbox while those who use dark-art tactics know from personal experience that the effects are very real....
VisiStat has now been collecting data on my blog for about a month and a half and I thought, rather than simply talk about VisiStat's product features and its pros & cons, it would be better to compare it to another reputable product in the industry: Google Analytics....
In search marketing, trust issues are further magnified by the fact that the industry is still in its infancy and there are no set rules or regulations. Let's face it, you'd be hard pressed to get a handful of SEO consultants to agree on a definition of SEO....
Longer search phrases are the natural progression of the Internet population boom. As more and more information is placed online, it becomes increasingly difficult to find exactly what you're looking for. The best advice I can give is to break up some of the mentions of longer keyphrases....
Using search as a B2B lead gen channel provides some unique challenges, but it can be very powerful. These are purchases that require a significant amount of online research. We know that's a perfect fit for search, but just be prepared to be patient for the pay off....
Anyone in the search engine industry has heard of WebPosition Gold, which was created by Brent Winters and his company, FirstPlace Software. No one can dispute the success of WebPosition. Brent and his team had a handle on the industry and on his target audience, and he gave us all what we wanted in his software....
When it comes to purchasing an SEO package, it all comes down to how much are you willing to pay per hour, and how many hours do you want to invest in your website's promotion efforts? While many SEOs charge a package price, how much goes into that package is determined by how many hours of their time the SEO is willing to invest, and for how much....
If your internal resources are already strained to the breaking point, you are probably considering outsourcing your SEO efforts. The search engine optimization company that you select should have the capability to handle all aspects of the project with minimal involvement from your company to save you time and keep your branding strategy intact....
It is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to be found by the right person, especially seeing as Google has replaced book cases of catalogues and rolodexes of business cards. Online competition means that B2B marketers need to position their companies in the best search engine, the best ranking, for the best query....
Research also reveals that the top search listings convey brand equity to users, another good reason for achieving high rankings in the SERPs. Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques produce top rankings in the SERPs, yet many web developers and designers do not take the time or do not know how to properly optimize a site for high rankings....
This is the first piece in an ongoing series on Click Fraud. Many in the search marketing and search advertising industries would prefer the issue be avoided altogether. Paid search advertising has grown to become a rapidly expanding multi-billion dollar industry, much of it based on the success of PPC....
Does your web site make search engines happy? Despite all the negative hype lately, it's pretty easy to design a web site that search engines will accept with open arms. All it takes is 3 easy steps....
Do you know if repeating keywords in the URL will help increase rankings within search engine results? If so does it have a big impact?...
We’ve learned first hand some of the realities of marketing in the B2B arena through research and working with clients, and in the interest of making the path a little less bloody, I’ll share the Top 10 things we’ve learned. The first 5 are this week, and I’ll follow up with the final 5 next week....
We all know how crucial it is to create captivating titles and descriptions for our Web pages. Those titles and descriptions should contain our keyword phrase, of course, but the true value of titles and descriptions is the clickability of them in the search results....
Online calendars have been available for many years now but the calendar-sharing feature that Google has included in Google Calendar has opened the door to a great a form of social marketing that is bound to make waves and possibly increase your bottom line....
Having analytics in place is just half of the solution, actually using them and tailoring them to provide solid information and reasoning is what separates those on the leading edge from those on the bleeding edge....
Visitors are welcomed by your navigation as the primary means of traveling your website. Your navigation can be friendly and lead them to the answers they seek, or it can be confusing and not provide any indication of where to go. Considering that keywords are an anchor to your business and search engine ranking, I can't understand why someone would dedicate prime navigation space to two words that do not mean anything....
When providing services such as Search Marketing strategies to large B2B tech firms you will find that there are several levels of management to please (this is the case for many large corporations). With above average sales cycles and the focus to produce quality leads it’s important to establish the right metrics to satisfy all levels within the company....
Search engine marketing is simultaneously an intense game of taking action to increase sales while also a patient intermission of waiting to see the results. There is almost always something that can be done to improve your site and your search rankings, but after making specific changes you must be patient enough to wait for the results of those changes to come back and be compared against the previous changes....
In cases where a client is smarter than you are about SEO, insists on saturating his keyword pages at 5%, and currently consistently hits in the top 20 on his Google searches. Is there any tactful way a copywriter can tell this kind of client that he may be destroying his currently high ranking when he implements these new "search friendly" pages?...
Supplemental results are generally pages that Google has determined to be secondary to other, more relevant pages that Google has indexed on your website. In effect, supplementary results are actually a secondary database of results that are only called upon when the most obscure queries force Google to check all its indexed resources....
Pay per Call is an alternative channel that’s growing rapidly. The Kelsey Group estimates the Pay per Call market will more than double for the next five years, with revenues topping 3.7 billion by 2010. That makes it a revenue producing opportunity that more and more online publishers are beginning to pay attention to....
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