Website Marketing Online
Online advertising and search engine marketing, (usual referral’s are SEO, SEM, PPC, Web 2.0, Blogging, Linking, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Banner Ads, URL Rewrite, Content Copywriting, or Back link popularity) have been sold like snake oils at a traveling circus from Bellingham Washington to Bellingham Massachusetts since the white text scandal. It seems everyone is looking for a quick fix and everything is going to go bonkers like the .com craze. While the economy settles to a rumble around us, small business is looking for the best bang for your buck, ROI (Return on investment), efficiency, go green. I noticed some of the first stocks to turn upwards were internet related, computer industry, or website marketing based, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple. My presidential campaign slogan: Google ad-words internet marketing based advertising will save the economy, they make dollars and they make sense.
Paid Listings
You learn a lot about ROI while you get involved in a
Google ad-words or pay per click campaign because you can actually track your marketing budget’s success. Unlike paper advertising like direct mail, business cards, flyers; or media advertising like
Television and Radio you can analyze visitors’ activities to a very specific page of your site and visibly see the spike in traffic or bounce effect or bounce rate. That makes it very easy to justify spending dollars. For example, if you spend 100$ in sponsored listings and make 500$, you can usually assume then that a 500$ investment equates to a 2500$ return. A great way to cut some fat off of your PPC advertising campaign is to optimize the titles, descriptions, and landing pages for your sponsored links. Banner ads, the most targeted of all markets are a great way to advertise locally. A local daycare shouldn’t be spending advertising dollars in Seattle, it is a waste of energy and money, their relevant market is local to Whatcom County.
WWW.Neighborhood-kids.com would be a perfect saturated target market for a local daycare. Sure, a lot more people would see the ad if it was on the Bellingham Herald, but how focused would that person on kid related activities be and what percentage of those viewers would have daycare age children? The point is you still pay for all those irrelevant views to your advertisement and then even the relevant views may not be in a phase of the “buying cycle”.
Organic Search Engine Ranking
Natural search engine optimization is a horse of a different color, but still a pony. I’ve found most of the best tactics are done behind the scenes by the great and powerful Oz, the code gurus. Aspects of indexing a site’s content that are easy to figure are title tags, content, keyword density, internal links, site maps, and alt tags for images…just to name a few. Remember the search engines spiders’ are reading a site like brail, usually blind to most design features like color and creativity. The easier to use, more organized, and relevant a sites’ content the more likely it will have the answers the internet searcher is seeking sooner.
Don’t make me think.
Website Popularity Contest (the black sheep)
What if two sites are built almost the same? What if a site doesn’t meet certain criteria? The search engines will have to take into other factors. It is the search engines job to be the most popular so in turn they want to have the most popular sites populate for the princes and the paupers peeping their peeps. Therefore, they track hits to the site, links to the site, activity coming in from outside sources like articles or videos and so on. “Viral marketing” was coined based on the relation to the way a virus spreads person to person, like an old fashion
pyramid scheme. One of the best ways to keep your site popular is by having a blog and blogging. The big directory back links like
DMOZ, active popular hip trendy quirky revolutionary un-politically correct political stylish well written nerdy blog sites, and educational websites(.edu) are anchors also.
Old Money
The search engines also will take into consideration a site that has proved itself as a Big Kahuna, it has rode the waves since America online.
Google is the most trusted brand in America and it got there by putting it’s trust in trusting trusted brands. Start ups can earn some street creds by showing there website is a serious investment and they plan to be here for awhile.
Keyword Strategy
The most important part of all of these are…drum roll…keyword searches, besides viral marketing I guess…and just having enough money to buy anything you want. If you want to pop up for “Black leather purse”, first of all good luck. Second of all, you want to be the last website that person sees when in their buying cycle, Last?. Yes, last, they stop searching when they find what they like and…drum roll…make a purchase, or call you, or find directions. When you are buying BMW you search “BMW”, once you find that you want an X5, you search “BMW X5”, then “2003 BMW X5”, then “2003 BMW X5 Bellingham Wa.”. You must find you niche in the market and make sure your site is usable. I could pop up # 1 in the search engines for “ purple poslovian pirate puppies ” but what good would that do me? So if a company promises you ((
#1 OVERALL IN GOOGLE)echoing)…for what? And will it be my website or a listing on your site? Target those “buying” keywords! Visitors are great, buyers are necessary.
Purple Poslovian Pirate Puppies (Analytics)
The most important part for you as a business owner in Bellingham or where ever, whether you are marketing internationally, over seas, or buying locally is supplying the demand. How do you know what is in demand without analysis. Get trendy, trends make mucho peso, look at NSync, they are like the cabbage patch dolls of the music industry but they dance. Be ahead of the curve, insider trading is legal online or is that offshore, I think…I can’t remember. Actually, don’t quote me on that. These search engine marketing robots show up somewhat unbeknownst and who they really, I mean truly are inside is still a mystery, they put up there walls to keep themselves from getting hurt. “You complete me” your website says. Maybe search engine spiders are eerily a lot like the Rene Zellweger’s of the WorldWideWeb but doesn’t that make you want your website to be their Tom Cruise?(minus the whole Tom Cruise thing)
The Cold Hard Facts
Most of SEO and SEM results for the average yahoo can be likened to applying tactics to an Idaho power ball drawing. There is a lot of SEO 101 information up there in that blog post. This is just the tip of the iceberg and it is still an educated guess based on experience. A smart, original, and innovative business model is still the best recipe for success, we can ad rocket fuel and coordinates on your trip to the
planet Google.
